concert!

We went to see Crosby, Stills, and Nash on Saturday night at Ironstone Vineyards up in Murphys. The winery has lovely grounds and an amphiteater, which was sold out - about 7000 people. For some reason, I was anxious about going to the concert all last week. I'm not sure what that was about, but the anxiety dissipated as soon as the show started.

The concert was terrific. The sound quality was good, and it wasn't too loud where we were on the lawn. We were a really good audience, too, very into the show. They were just awesome performers. Given the kind of music they are known for, you wouldn't expect a high-energy sort of show. Obviously there wasn't a whole lot of jumping around dancing craziness, but the singing and playing performances had a ton of energy, just all in the music itself. David Crosby, for instance, just doesn't move around much at all, but he's still totally present in the songs themselves, particularly when he's playing.

Crosby had a bad sore throat, he explained, so he had a hell of a time, but got through the evening, and in a certain range you would never have guessed he was ailing at all. Graham Nash sounded just like Graham Nash, but Stephen Stills now sounds like Tom Waits and Bob Dylan's love child.

I don't know why, but I was not prepared to be knocked silly by their guitar playing. Stills is just excellent, and in several styles of guitar - fingerstyle, rock, blues, and folk strumming stuff. I would aspire to be that good, but I frankly don't think I ever will be. David Crosby is no slouch, either. They played two of my favorite Crosby songs - Guennevere and Deja Vu - which are both played in non-standard tunings (which I love).

CSN were the main inspiration for me to learn to play the guitar, and to play the way I do. It was excellent!

But now I am tired. We drove home after the show, and didn't get to bed until 3 am Sunday. Then I made 8 or 9 different tapas dishes on Sunday, cooking between turns of our role-play game. Then, of course, I got up for class this morning.

my letter to Senator Denham

I wrote my letter to Jeff Denham. Denham scores 100% favorable by the California Chamber of Commerce, and a 31% rating from the Consumer Federation of California.


Dear Senator Denham,

I am writing to urge you to support improved funding of the California State University. During this time of grave economic difficulty, funding the CSU is vital to the state’s recovery from recession.

As a senator concerned with protecting the economic interests of his constituents, you must already recognize the significant role the California State University plays in the state’s economic growth. Three recent reports on the economic and fiscal impact of the CSU all agree that California receives a tremendous return on funds invested in the system. The entire northern San Joaquin valley benefits from the economic contributions of CSU Stanislaus graduates.

A well-funded CSU will extend educational opportunities to your constituents – opportunities they might otherwise not have. As you know, at CSU Stanislaus, a large proportion of our students are first-generation college students. The significance of their access to affordable, high-quality CSU education is nearly impossible to overstate. It improves their lives and the lives of their children.

The California State University contributes to the common good of all Californians. California’s historical commitment to public funding of education at all levels – in particular of higher education – was a major factor in realizing the California dream of prosperity. It has represented a unique civic partnership, renowned worldwide for its foresight, democratic spirit, and power to provide opportunity for all.

It is time to renew the promise of California. I urge you to help find the resources and revenue necessary to fully fund the California State University.

furlough - day 1

Tomorrow is my first furlough day for the academic year. It's a non-instructional day, but seeing as how I have sworn that I will not do any university work on my furlough days, I won't be checking my email, won't attend any meetings, won't see to any student issues or questions.

What will I do?

I'm going to write a letter to my state senator, explaining why the need for furloughs is the result of the scandalous revocation of the state's commitment to funding public higher education, despite the documented 441% return on investment the state gets from the CSU. I'll probably also post that letter here.

I'm going to spend some time re-reading the Collective Bargaining Agreement between CSU and the California Faculty Association. I'm going to look into the ongoing investigations CFA is doing on how the furlough and budget cuts have been implemented, to see how I can contribute.

It's a furlough. It's a day I've been required not to work. It's not a vacation.

toxic

The institution I affectionately call Cow State Santa Claus seems headed toward some kind of catastrophic meltdown. Relations between faculty and administration are not merely untenably volatile, they are as close to violence as could be without actual physical attacks.

I tire of recounting and documenting the strife. I'm also now, for the first time in a very long time, actually worried about retaliation for being candid. (I'm on the tenuous track - a non-tenurable lecturer.)

At the campus president's "state of the university" address today, he informed the audience that the problems at the university are the fault of faculty leadership. This parallels the recent comment of CSU Chancellor Charles Reed that the problems at Santa Claus are because the faculty here are "toxic."

The "problems" are as follows:

1) For several years, the university has been running a $4 million deficit. Suddenly, last academic year, the administration decided to solve the deficit all at once, while facing deep cuts from the California state budget crisis. Faculty objected. The administration did it anyway. Result: 187 tenuous-track faculty had their work cut or eliminated (out of 250) for this year. 114 classes were cut this fall.

2) Several junior faculty, still working through the anxious years prior to getting tenure, have received letters from administrators telling them that they are not meeting scholarship expectations, despite those faculty getting strong support from their departments and colleges. The faculty have objected, saying that this is a teaching institution, that the mission of the university and the workload of faculty must mean that research demands cannot be made to look like a Research-1 university.

3) Faculty involved in budget committees have asked, repeatedly, for several years, for budget and financial reporting information that clearly accounts for how the university spends money. Several of the faculty involved in those committees have been accounting professors. The faculty have been told, variously, that the information was already given to them, or that it does not exist, or that they do not need it, or that the information they have is sufficient already.

The president is right that faculty leadership hasn't changed all that much in the last few years - certainly not as dramatically as administration has changed. We've had 4 provosts, 4 vice-presidents of business and finance, 3 vice presidents of university advancement (the foundation leader), and countless deans, over the past 5 years. Perhaps if faculty leadership changed as rapidly as administration, faculty would have a perspective more like administration's.

[As I was writing this post, I quipped to my loveliest that I was writing a post that could get me fired. She suggested that was somehow unwise. I replied that, given the way the CSU is budgeting, I'm as likely as not to be fired, anyway. Time, undoubtedly, will tell.]

Kiss kiss.

scientific method?

I really, really don't get it. Certain web sites seem especially prone to presenting what seem to me to be incredibly stupid ads. I can't tell which of the premises of these I find most craptastic. It might be the "Obama says...." ads with totally unrelated animated gifs on them, of a dog in a car window, or a woman talking, or this one, with a woman jogging. The ads always say that President Obama has said something about mothers going to college, or people refinancing their houses, or about reducing debt. (Nothing he's actually said, of course.)



So, what is it that makes advertisers think that having the irrelevant gif files and irrelevant reference to Obama saying something he never said would have a positive effect on their website traffic or their businesss? Have they studied this marketing ploy and drawn the conclusion that the real big money in whatever loan scam they're running is going to come from people who are, for reasons perhaps best plumbed by psychiatric medicine, motivated positively by the two women dancing crazily in an office gif? Or are they looking for people who are incapable of stopping themselves from clicking on animated gifs whenever their eyes are caught by them? Is that a good market?

I've already vented about the ads that look like links to news stories that appear on news sites. Most of them are auto fill-in scripts that put together fake headlines about the mom in [insert name of central city of metro statistical area estimated to be in region of user based on (a) IP address of browser, (b) ISP account info stored in cookie, (c) zip code stored in cookie, or (d) zip code of registered owner of IP address of site] who [(a) lost (b) earns (c) whitened her teeth] [insert (a) 47 lbs, (b) 6 lbs of fat, (c) 43 lbs, (d) $63/hr] [insert (a) following this one simple rule, (b) on the internet, (c) with this one simple secret, (d) acai berry juice, (e) herbal V 1agra!!!!!!].

Generally, they are as relevant to your own life as all the following:



Now, see, they lost me here. They needed an animated gif of somebody buying coffee and a donut, whereupon I would, of course, immediately click on the ad.

On the other hand, as idiotic as these are as advertisements, as poorly as I think they reflect on the level of creativity and initiative (and, one imagines, also profitability) of internet advertising, they operate as a rather fine index of the average American's lifestyle.

one last summer feast

My loveliest is singing in a local production of a musical, and we invited our friends Jennifer and Andrew out to visit, see the show, and be fed prime rib. Then we invited our buddies X-ina and Guerin, and also Lauren's boss and our friend Lee. Then Jen and Andy changed plans.

Still wanting to celebrate the show, and cook something special, we decided to wait on the prime rib, and instead I started thinking about gnocchi. The first time I made gnocchi, I thought to myself, well, I'll never do that again. I thought that the second time, too. I'm still making gnocchi. I made an extra-large batch, so there'd be some frozen extra gnocchi (it freezes quite well, uncooked; I don't know about par-boiled, but I think that would make sense too), and it is a lot of work to do it at all, so what the heck.

Last night, I made two different sauces for it - a gorgonzola cream sauce with spinach, much like the version served at L'Osteria in North Beach (SF). I added nutmeg (which I adore) and Kierschwasser to the sauce, to give it a different twist. The other sauce was an altered version of Mario Batalli's lemon sage butter sauce. There's leftover of the gorgonzola sauce, but you can't have any, because I'm mean.

Then came a salad, then came the main course - roast pork loin, stuffed with shallots, fennel, sage, and breadcrumbs, with a pan sauce made with some vermouth, my own demi-glace, and the drippings browned on the pan, along with long fine julienned carrots and zucchini, which I also roasted. I wish now I'd snapped a picture. The presentation was pretty cool, with the slices of stuffed roast down the middle of our big white porcelain platter, and the heaps of vegetables on either side.

I mean, I knew, as this plan started coming together on Thursday morning, that fennel would stuff pork very nicely. I didn't bargain for this to go so tremendously well. This was one of my best efforts, I think. But on balance, I gotta say, people who cook, you should stuff a pork loin with fennel. Your mouth will thank me.

presidential imperial authority

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

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

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

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

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

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

file under: probably shouldn't mention...

I've been dealing with the fallout from the CSU budget cuts - specifically, the faculty furlough and the slashing of hundreds of lecturer positions. It hadn't occurred to me until now that I'm going through the stages of grief. Today I'm angry.

And this is what I think I shouldn't write about, but compulsively am anyway. The budget catastrophe is, actually, old news. The CSU has been under assault since the rise to power of Der Gropenfuhrer in 2001. Budgets have been cut four times, and Arnold has promised the citizens of California that he would "starve" the public sector. The public loved this, apparently, because they re-elected him, apparently not realizing that by "the public," he meant them, their schools, their roads, their cities. Funny, that. Apparently.

I've been telling people about this for, roughly, 7 years. I've been soliciting their attention and help for about five. Please, I'd say, write your legislator. Write a letter to the editor. Come to a rally. Tell your students. Help us elect education-friendlies.

I got a lot of thank-you notes. But other than the CFA activists on campus, and an effort this past year that students organized for our more local problems, not a lot of people got involved. Some faculty smirked at me. Some seemed to think I was overly paranoid, combative, harshly critical of the CSU administration, the Board of Trustees Saboteurs, or the political process.

Now, lecturers keep contacting me, asking what I can do to help them out. Part of me, today, is thinking that it would have been nice if they had joined the fight years ago.

Mainly, though, I'm angry at the smirkers. You disliked my belligerent attitude? You scoffed at my anxieties? Now, you'll have a lot more time to contemplate it. And I'll be paying for your unemployment insurance. You're welcome.

See, that's not fair. I realize that my anger is part of the grieving process, and that I'm not just grieving the jobs of so many faculty and staff, so many educational careers of our students, but also my own career. I know that this is a reaction to the anxiety - or perhaps certainty is the better word - that my career, my passion, the only meaningful work I ever imagined I could do, is going to end in a year.

In a couple weeks, the mushroom cloud will ooze over our students, and they'll be asking why their classes have disappeared, why their enrollments have been canceled and they have to try to re-schedule classes, with no spaces left in any of them. Most of them won't have any idea what's hit them. That's gonna be fun, too.

fantasy conversation

I suppose everyone has made-up conversations in their own heads, and I suppose further that they do especially with people they expect confrontation from: ex-lovers, parents, people in authority. I tend to have them with college administrators.

I had one today, in which an administrator on our campus (whom I shan't name, not out of fear but out of a random attack of discretion) asked me why I'm so repulsed by administrators, why I assume all of them are out to get us.

"Well," I said, in my head, "like managers and executives in corporate America, college administrators are basically unaccountable to anyone whose lives and careers they affect. For one thing, their incredible degree of vertical and especially horizontal mobility means that they move on somewhere else before they can be taken to account for what they've done. But perhaps even more significant is that the administrators who aren't overtly, gleefully malfeasant have a direct self-interest to protect - displaying total obedience and fealty to executives. The entire system of management rewards base aspiration and punishes moral autonomy."

To which, in my imagination, the administrator replied with portrayals of shock and dismay.

I put it differently in my head another time: "The basic problem is that the executive class bears no responsibility for its actions, relations with other constituencies, and so on. They simply move on, having 'fixed' (in a veterinary, not a mechanical, sense) the university, to 'fix' another one."

I just wanted to vent a bit. Thanks.

pardon me while I have a strange interlude

I can't find a site that lets me upload a streaming mp3 large enough for this track. It's 13 MB. Sorry.

If you hit this link to Myspace (ugh), it should work. I hope. Dammit.

I'm not sure this is actually music. One might suspect I can't actually play a guitar (there are admittedly a couple minor flubs). But this is how I meant this to sound. Honest. This is a tune based on a scale I've been playing for years, and which isn't really a scale. All that I know about music tells me the intervals are totally wrong. It makes me very happy.

Working title was "Almost Music." Then I decided to name it after a weird bit of business in my favorite Marx Brothers movie. Groucho says, "Pardon me while I have a strange interlude," referring to the Theater Guild play titled Strange Interlude.

The tune is composed of chords and scales built on a scale starting at A and going as follows: A A# C C# E F G# A. People who know about music recognize the total wrongness of such a scale. Sorry about the flubs. Not sorry about the scale. Deal.

are we gonna get sued?

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

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

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

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

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

firebombed

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

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

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

song, new, etc.

The Suspension of Disbelief

back to things

12. Crosswords and other word games found in newspapers. I just love 'em. Back when I subscribed to the Modesto Bee (their motto: One Of America's Newspapers?), I did the crossword, the Jumble, the cryptogram, and the anagram games every day. Now that the Bee is far less a part of my life - which is almost entirely a good thing - I do the online crossword from the San Francisco Chronicle (their motto: San Francisco Is Hipper Than Anywhere Else, And Even Though There Is No Real Proof Of This, And Indeed A Lack Of Evidence Showing It's Any Hipper Than, Say, Portland, We Will Continue Our Policy Of Smug Use Of The Phrase "The City" To Refer To San Francisco, As Though No Other Place Even Qualifies As A City. I know - unwieldy, ain't it?). I've looked but cannot find any other of the daily word games online.

13. Strawberry tarts. I just love 'em. I happen to make a mean strawberry tart, and I happen to have made one yesterday, which we sampled last night as dessert. Boy, howdy. (I'd post a picture to brag and to create envy/hunger, but we left our camera in Hayward.)

Whenever I make a tart, we run lines from an old Monty Python sketch, in which a Pepperpot (a Python in drag) offers her husband a series of desserts all including rat as an ingredient, ending the list with "strawberry tart." It turns out the strawberry tart also has rat in it, three of them, so the husband asks for a slice "without so much rat in it." Subsequently, a church police officer (it's complicated) refers to it as "rat tart," which is funny, but also the more accurate description of any strawberry tart with three rats in it. Consequently, we refer to strawberry tart as "rat tart."

anxiety, doom, etc.

It looks, tentatively, like I'll have a full-time teaching job this coming academic year. It also looks like the CSU budget will be cut much more next year, so this could be my last year teaching philosophy.

In those circumstances, it's pretty difficult to avoid being terribly anxious. I get especially anxious in anticipation of something dreadful (as opposed to when it actually happens), when I have a pretty clear idea what that dreadful thing will be, when I can't control whether or how the dreadful thing will happen, and when those who do have that control I have good reason to suspect of working against me.

Let's run a quick check down this list, to see whether these conditions apply. Yes, yes, yes, hell yes.

Am I doomed? Experts disagree. I say I am. My loveliest says no.

I am easy to convince that I'm doomed. I have always been keen to conclude that I'm doomed. I've been right, in fairly serious ways, on a couple occasions.

So if I proceed to list a few of the many reasons I have to feel fortunate and rich in this lower-middle, working-class, renter's existence, it would be a transparently obvious effort to combat anxiety.

I am in love.

I am in a very loving, very supportive, creative, inspiring, passionate, steady long-term mate-ship. My love is a wonder to me, and the biggest wonder of all her wonders is that she loves me. I feel like that every single day.

I have been incredibly lucky to have the chance to do what I love for a living. Hardly anyone gets that chance. The only job I ever wanted other than teaching philosophy is being a rock star - and that seems unlikely at this point (people do start second careers, though).

I get to play guitars every day. I get to write songs, when I can. I get a lot of joy from that, and from music generally.

I am a really good cook. I've turned at least 3 people on to several foods that they previously either didn't like at all or would never think of eating, because I cook them just that well.

I am healthy. I'm relatively fit. I own three pairs of hot pink high-tops.

I can write. I have a PhD in philosophy, which I don't think can be revoked, so that has to count as both a lasting accomplishment and an opportunity I was lucky to have and take advantage of.

At this point, I'm not crazy, sick, homeless, or being shot at or tortured by anyone.

Okay then.

X-ina's Birfday!

Happy Birthday Christina!

Here's a link to her song (I took out the autoplayer because it was playing two songs at once, very confusing):

Xina's Birfday


This is not the very first Paper Cats recording in which I sing. It is the first that has been made public, for the simple reason that I'm terribly shy about singing. I feel that I have about the worst singing voice ever. My love, who sings beautifully, and loves singing, encourages singing at all times and everywhere, but generally I cannot comply... unless I sing in this goofy voice I've compounded and developed from muppets, Bobcat Goldthwait, and Barney from The Simpsons.

The song is kinda cool, actually. And it's a birfday present, so what the hell.

open mic night and fried things

Paper Cats rocks out!

We had our second public performance on Monday night at an open mic night at a bar in Hayward called the Bistro. Our friends Jen and Andy were going with our grad school buddy Paul, who is also a song writer and rock legend, at least to us. We hemmed and hawed, but in the end overcame our anxieties and misgivings and did a set. We played four songs: a new one that doesn't really have a name yet, and friend-favorites All The Quirky Singer-Songwriters You Can Eat, Fifth of July, and Lancelot's Song.

And we proceeded to close the bar, at close to 2, watching all the rest of the open mic-ers. I was glad we did. They stayed to hear us, after all, and the last two were terrific: a fingerstyle player who did excellent versions of two Beatles songs and a few other things, and a straight-ahead rocker with a vague resemblance to Jackson Browne. Of course, that meant we didn't get to bed until around 4-ish, and woke up Tuesday in less than ideal physical condition.

I'm so glad we did it, and now I feel a little more confident that we can play songs, in public, and not have rotting fruit, skunky beer, or broken furniture thrown at us.

The afternoon before, we went to the Hayward/Russell City blues festival, and heard some good Texas blues, ate some fried catfish and snapper, and generally enjoyed the heck out of ourselves. I forget to enjoy life sometimes, which might seem ridiculous, but it's nonetheless true. Especially this past year, I've been so focused on such awful crap, spent so much time and energy on it, that I was alienated from fun.

Plus, being around my friend Andrew, who is a psychology Phd and faculty at a junior college, is incredibly therapeutic. I feel mentally healthier after a couple days with him, always.

We came home to 100 degrees, and no Internet access. Something Happened to our modem and wireless router, both 6 years old, and no matter what I tried, they simply would not work. This morning I bought a new modem, which seemed to be the problem, but then when I connected the router, it came on, then sort of fritzed, and the router equivalent of dashboard idiot lights came on and stayed on. So we bought a new router - a much faster one, so in all this isn't so bad. It took 5 hours to get the damned things running properly, configured properly, hooked up to DSL line and through password gateways and all the rest of it. But now we're up. Now that I've spent 10 hours on this annoying, expensive problem, I think we're gonna watch something funny.

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.