anticipitipalpitation

It's been awhile, but I now feel an old familiar holiday feeling I used to have - anticipatory dread of the holiday job application rejection season.

Because of an ages-old tradition of inhumane psychic brutality, the American Philosophical Association runs the largest chunk of tenure-track university faculty job searches. (I suppose the official rationale has something to do with the integrity of the search process and the profession, but I'll leave such bullshit aside.) The way the APA runs this show is as follows:

They hold the "Eastern Division" meeting of the APA every December 27-30 in a large Eastern city, generally rotating between New York (this year's site), Boston, Atlanta, Washington, and Philadelphia. The location and date assure maximum possible disruption of the holiday, highest possible travel and accommodation expenses, and greatest possible travel difficulties.

At the meeting, there is a main program of papers and presentations, as well as meetings of numerous philosophical societies (for instance, the group for "Realist/Antirealist Discussion" usually meets there). But the main event is the job interviews.

University philosophy departments across the continent (yes, including Canada) who have made early decisions about hiring a tenure-track faculty member tend to hold initial interviews at the APA. The way this used to run, I believe, was that job candidates and people with job openings would all show up, and the meeting would be a kind of open-enrollment job fair. That never happens anymore. Although some departments set up additional interviews at the meeting, almost all of them have slated their interviews already.

So why go to an expensive hotel in the dead of winter, between Christmas and New Year's, if you've already selected your 10 candidates and won't be inviting any walk-ins? Is it just because you like hanging out with the group for Realist/Antirealist Discussion, and can't get out to see them otherwise?

To really understand why this tradition subsists despite all the very good reasons to stop it, you have to go to one of the meetings. I'll save you the trouble. It's depressing as hell. Hundreds of (mainly newly-minted Phd) unemployed philosophers hang around looking like an army of Eeyores, or carting around massive briefcases full of their CVs and writing samples and trying to look impressive as they ask knowing questions in conference sessions. They're all desperate for what they imagine to be the ultimate job. A sorrier looking pack of mutts you'll never see. They all have the look in their eye like they just want to know what they have to do to avoid getting beaten with the newspaper again.

Meanwhile, during the week before, with your plane ticket and hotel already booked for 3 glorious days hanging around the lobby of the Marriott (or whatever), your future in hock to pay for the privilege, you wait around home for the phone to ring, setting up that last-ditch interview chance. Every so often the mail brings you another form letter from another college thanking you for your interest and explaining that it was unilateral. That's the joy the APA meeting and job search tradition brings to hundreds of people every holiday season.

I don't have a ticket. I'm not going. It would have cost over $1000 for me to go sit feeling stupid and forlorn in New York, and if I'd wanted to make a holiday of it and bring my loveliest with me, add an extra $500 to the trip, while we anticipate my imminent unemployment. So no, I'm not going. I am waiting, however, for a phone call that may never come.

rallies last week at CSU Stanislaus

I just wanted to post links to youtube video of rallies on campus this week.

The student walk-out on Wednesday drew 200-300 people. Some great speeches, some weirdness, and afterwards a march through the administration building, to a busy streetcorner, and back. (The occupation of the president's office followed all that.)

So, the start of the rally: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMEiC7DquFo&feature=related

Midway through this chunk of it, if anybody's interested, I suggest being hopeful and organizing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSJBlduAFt0&feature=related


And then, on Thursday, the music and art students' performance in the administration building. Have a hanky at the ready. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVMfQ-KvFM4

I haven't seen video of the whole Thursday performance. It was beautiful and tremendously moving, as I mentioned in my earlier post.

holiday wake for the music and art programs

We attended a wake today, held by the students in the art and music departments, for their own programs. It was a heartbreaking, powerful, symbolic protest, that the soulless and gutless administrators callously ignored even though it was happening right in front of them.

There's a holiday tradition on our campus of the university's tremendously accomplished choir singing carols in various buildings. This year, they decided to alter this tradition in protest. This year they suffered a $209,000 cut, and next year they stand to suffer another $205,000 cut in their funding. As a result, the program could stand to lose 2/3 of their students.

So they held a holiday wake for themselves. They sang dirges along with carols, and in the end, they sang "Joy to the World" in four-part harmony, in their building-filling voices, while they one-by-one covered their mouths with black gags and silenced themselves. They put themselves, symbolically, to death, in the building occupied by the administration that has spent more than $500,000 on new administrative positions just this year, instead of funding their programs, and blamed the state's economy for it. They mourned their tremendously successful program on the same day the university administration announced the arrival of a new associate vice president for human resources, and candidate visits for a the third dean of business in the last calendar year, and for the new provost. Easily, far more has been spent on replacing administrators - during a period of "hiring freeze" - than it would take to continue this vibrant, creative program going strong.

Lauren was crying throughout their concert. I was fighting tears, mainly successfully, because for me anger trumps despair.

All I could do today was bear witness. What a stupid, vicious, corrupt waste! What a terrible abuse of power! Imagine - choosing to sacrifice music and art for that!

(I was going to write something analytical about the obvious indication of budget priorities is presented by the constant hiring of high-level administrators during a hiring freeze, but my heart's broken. Can't do it.)

note on protest and power

Briefly: Power is not located only in "seats" or palaces. An action protesting governmental action doesn't have to take place in the so-called seat of governmental authoritarian power. Because authoritarian power is deployed ubiquitously over broad regions, and in countless exchanges and interactions, resistance can happen anywhere. Moreover, resistance should happen everywhere (which is as much a prediction as a prescription).

Any intelligent contemporary media theory would point this out. Networked communication is networked power. Resistance can be an overtaking of the machinery of the network, a reverse-flow, or even just cognitive dissonance. Tactics and strategy do not have to be concentrated, nor even apparently rational (not according to the instrumental rationality of a dominant force) to be effective. And "effective" does not need to mean "winning, today."

But the people who are publicly denying that small-scale action and media networking are effective are only doing so cynically or in reaction to the real threat to their power that those nodes of resistance create.

Finally, human energy and fun are forms of counter-power.

That's what I'm learning so far from CSU resistance movements.

uncomfortable questions

The last week or so, several people have asked me about what I'm teaching next spring. The fact of the matter is, I don't know whether I am teaching next spring. I don't know if I'm teaching in Winter Term come January.

This has got me a little freaked out.

I don't have much more to say about it at the moment. Life hasn't been in this much flux in a while. Losing steady employment is like that. Potentially losing a career is like that, too.

I heard a story this afternoon on the local NPR station about budget cuts to services provided to California inmates, in particular education and job training services. The story included a soundbite from a woman who has taught printing classes at a California prison for many years. She's 46, thought she had a career going, and now is pretty much stuck. Man, I can relate.

scholarship opportunity at the CSU

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

Schwarzenegger-Reed Scholarships

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

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

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


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


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

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger
State Capitol Building
Sacramento, CA 95814

Here's the actual press release from the CSU:

CSU Breaks Record for Student Applications

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

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

hopeful pessimism

I am a hopeful pessimist. That’s not as self-contradictory as it may seem.

I’ll stipulate some definitions:
An optimist is a person who, in the absence of evidence to demonstrate it, believes a situation will improve. A pessimist is a person who, in the absence of evidence to demonstrate it, believes a situation will worsen. A hopeful person is one who, in the absence of evidence to demonstrate it, believes efforts to improve a situation are worthwhile. A hopeless person is one who, in the absence of evidence to demonstrate it, believes efforts to improve a situation are not worthwhile.

There are hopeless optimists. They believe that efforts to improve a situation are not worthwhile, but that nonetheless the situation will improve. Some libertarians, for instance those who believe in the “invisible hand,” appear to be hopeless optimists. They believe that efforts to improve the situation of impoverished people are not worthwhile, and are in fact destructive, because the only way to improve the situation of impoverished people is to do nothing – the situation will simply improve.

Hopeless pessimists believe that the situation will worsen and that our efforts to improve it are not worthwhile. Some hopeless pessimists believe our efforts are impotent against whatever force is making the situation worsen. Some believe our efforts will only make matters all the worse. A sort of extreme version of the hopeless pessimist believes that we are doomed, and that our efforts to avoid doom only make us more, or more quickly, doomed.

Not me. I’m a hopeful pessimist, on most matters. Ecologically, for instance, I believe we are doomed, but that our efforts to improve the ecological situation, even if they won’t make us less doomed, could make our doom less terrible than it might be. I am extremely pessimistic about California’s near future and the future of the CSU. Indeed, the CSU as it has been known may be doomed. But in this case, I am terribly hopeful (I mean hopeful in a terrible way), because I believe that the efforts of all of us who care about the CSU and about California matter a great deal, and are worthwhile because of the solidarity they create. That solidarity is valuable even if the CSU is doomed.

It’s a good philosophy. It keeps me energetic.

more doom

California faces a $21 billion deficit on top of an already slashed budget this year. First on the list of targets will be higher education.

Somehow, the fact that the state gets a 400% return on its investment in higher education hasn't appealed to supposedly fiscally prudent legislators from the party which claims to be fiscally prudent. Perhaps prison spending is somehow more lucrative? (Which it might be, if you or your friends have lots of money invested in private prison companies the state increasingly contracts with.)

In any case, I'm struck by this a new way this morning. This isn't just a matter of cynically cutting the higher ed budget to punish the more-often-Democratic-voting faculty and graduates of California's colleges. It's also not really a panic reaction to the low revenues.

The Master Plan for California higher education was nothing less than a trust among the citizens of California. It was a commitment to cooperate in support of the future of all of us. In a way, it expressed a moral commitment to lend mutual support to the aspirations of all.

What some have managed to do is so corrupt and distort public dialogue, that no one ever speaks of mutual cooperation or common good any longer (except for crazy academics, apparently). The entirety of political and social life has been reduced in this rhetoric to individual competition and consumption. Mutual regard, cooperative enterprise, social or political solidarity - hell, community - are values that have all but disappeared from public discourse.

I think that dismissing solidarity and cooperation as values and as forms of human social life is ignoring at least half of what human life is about.

The rhetoric that eliminates all consideration of these values calls upon us to treat one another with mutual contempt and suspicion, to disregard one another's humanity.

no confidence

Yesterday the academic senate voted to send a resolution of no confidence in the campus president to a vote of the general faculty. I have little doubt it will pass, but also not much more doubt it will have no real effect. (Like I've written before, higher ed executives in the US are, like their corporate counterparts, essentially unaccountable kleptocratic elites.)

The senate also began consideration of a resolution of censure against the interim provost in response to an editorial he wrote in the local newspaper. It's basically slanderous about faculty.

One of my CFA friends emailed me about it, and I started thinking about the significance of a vote of no confidence. I seem to be in the minority about this, and I'm puzzled about it.

To me, a vote of no confidence in the campus president doesn't seem like that big a deal.

For one thing, campus presidents are people in positions of authority. I don't have respect for authority. I'm unimpressed with titles and suspicious of aspirations to power. The step from that basic attitude to no confidence seems really short to me.

Plus, the vote of no confidence likely won't mean very much, because our campus president has the approval of the chancellor. Charlie will send us a letter like the one he sent to the faculty speaker at Humboldt, but I bet it won't be as polite.

Then again, even if he takes the hint and leaves, he'll only be replaced by someone of a similar magnitude of similar undesirable traits. That's not because there are no good candidates for executive administrative positions out there. It's because there is little will to hire them, especially if they see the mission of higher education in anything but the crudest fiscal terms, or see the faculty as anything but a source of chaos and trouble.

None of which are reasons not to vote no confidence in the campus president. They just don't provide a strong reason to do so.

death throes

The CSU has been underfunded systemically for a decade or more. The campuses and the academic departments have struggled to make do, hired more contingent faculty like me, and simply had less resources and provided less service to students.

Now the CSU is under direct attack. The attack isn't coming from insane neocons like David Horowitz and his paranoid mob of anti-intellectual zealots (no link - he's unworthy of any attention). It's not coming - at least not directly - from the neocons in the legislature, who have already done their part anyway by assuring that the CSU continues to starve, slowly, to death.

No, this is an attack on the CSU by the CSU. Specifically, an attack on core programs and majors by CSU administrators. At Dominguez Hills, they're running through an accelerated program review, with whole departments on the chopping block. At Pomona, I just found out, they're going to do the same thing, with the criterion that any major with fewer than 150 undergraduate students will be put on the table for discontinuance.

The arbitrariness of the methods demonstrates pretty clearly that the future of the CSU, in these people's hands, is to become just like a for-profit proprietary technical school. They don't understand, don't respect, and will not defend the values of intellectual enterprise, for research or for teaching and learning. It's as our campus prez put it in his infamous Chronicle of Higher Ed piece a couple weeks ago. They view public higher education with any component of rigor, academic integrity, or intellectual reaching, as a privilege that neither the public, nor our students, nor the faculty, have any business expecting.

In addition, it shows how prudent they are. Do they have any reason to believe the new markets they imagine will come to the universities for technical training (rather than proprietary institutions we used to pride ourselves on not resembling)? Not that I can see.

So I'm on the philosophy teaching job market, which means I'm throwing myself to the four winds. I could end up in Buffalo, or Ohio, or British Columbia - anywhere.

That's personally distressing, of course. Being on the philosophy job market is its own kind of torture. But what's even more upsetting is that this is the result of a direct, unnecessary, opportunistic attack on the idea of public higher education, on the pretext of the budget cuts but in practice far more extensive.

why public higher education is a good ideaor not, depending

The CSU has been taken over by an administration that does not understand or care about the unique mission of public higher education. They see education as a privilege, and therefore see it as properly allocated according to who can pay more for it. Public higher education, on this view, is only worth whatever dregs the public deigns to spend on it. And if the public - like here in California - denies funding, this must mean that university funding isn't worth the public's money. Instead, public institutions should do more with less. The only educational value these administrators understand is the maximization of cost-efficiency.

First of all, maximum cost efficiency is not an educational value. The best education is neither the cheapest nor the one that generates the most graduates for the least cost. This is as useless a standard of education as overall grade-point average, because in either case, the outcome you're measuring has nothing to do with the quality of education.

But as a recent comment has it, quality of education is best determined not by standards of rigor established by faculty with field expertise. Quality of education is best determined by cost-efficiency. Let's recap that argument one more time: The appropriate way to judge the quality of university education is not to judge the quality of university education but to ask whether the university graduates people cheaply.

I won't belabor this point further, nor spend any more time unpacking the rest of this. It's making quite a stir among faculty across the CSU, because it basically explains the playbook for dismantling the CSU. This is why I wanted to have someone at the rally holding a sign that depicted one of our buildings burnt to the ground, with a Phoenix rising from its ashes. (I know - too conceptual. That's always been my fatal flaw as a creative artist.)

Maybe the question is more fundamental. On some level, what is being challenged is not just the way public education is done, but whether there should be any such thing as public university education.

The main reason I think public higher education is a right of citizens is because I believe in the social justice of equal opportunities for people to make good lives for themselves. The CSU was built to serve the educational needs of people who would never be able to afford private university education. The rationale for opening education to a larger populace made sense in 1960 and continues to do so now, I think: a well-educated public serves the public's interest.

One - indeed primary - way public university education serves the public's interest is economic. A well-educated worker generally earns more, and therefore contributes more to the economy through taxes, but in particular through spending. All told, we know, every dollar spent on the CSU is repaid to the state more than 4 times. It makes no economic sense at all not to fund public higher education. And yet, there is a large group of citizens in California and across the US who see public funding as government waste. I should hope more government programs would be as wasteful as one that generates a 400% return on investment.

On this basis, this narrow, mercenary, blinkeredly-fiscal basis, public funding for higher education is a benefit to the entire public. Current executive administration of the CSU basically denies this, for reasons they can't articulate, because they haven't got any. They don't make the case. They say, instead, that there's no money. When they are urged to pursue more public money, and use this argument to make the case, they say, instead, that there's no money. Funding to the CSU has been cut repeatedly this decade - in years of economic growth as well as decline - and every single time, CSU execs have shrugged and said there's just no money there.

The question that puzzles so many of us is, why? Why would you not fund a program that repays so handsomely? Why would our administrators fail to make this case?

I think the answer is implied in the comment linked above, in particular, the notion that higher education is a privilege, not a right. This basic denial of the social justice of public funding for higher education is the key to this. It's not a matter of serving the public good at all, but expressly of denying the public this good. Why do that, other than to redirect these economic goods into the hands of fewer and fewer people?

It may boil down to such a pecuniary interest. But the public's interest in education is not only economic. Public education serves a social and political good as well. It's true that educated people generate more economic activity, because of the economic value of their knowledge and skill. Educated people are more economically efficient, when considered solely as labor.

The "problem," from one group's standpoint at least, is that education has this side-effect, of helping people develop their own ideas and ways of thinking - critical skills and attitudes for active citizenship. Educated people ask uncomfortable questions about justice in their societies. Yes, so do less well educated people. The difference is that better educated people are also better at analyzing the problems, articulating what is wrong, reasoning out solutions, making the case for these solutions to the public at large. An educated public is socially and political dynamic. More to the point, education has the reputation of leading people to be more progressive politically.

The attack on the CSU is a two-pronged attack on the class of people who increasingly resemble peasants in our society: it undermines their opportunities for economic advancement (denying access, saddling them with school debt), and it undermines their opportunities for political and social understanding, activism, or resistance. De-funding public higher education is a terrific way to consolidate economic and political power for those who already have it.

And this gutting of the peasant class' last best hope for making their lives better is sold to them on the basis of the notion that they can't afford to fund it. It seems pretty obvious to me that we can't afford not to fund it.

save our classes rally

We had a pretty damn good rally, for our little politically-inert campus. We think around 150-200 people showed up, the speeches were good, the crowd was inspired. We got 150 or so cards signed urging support for AB 656 (an oil severance tax to help fund higher education), and I think over 100 letters to our campus president.

I was emceeing, so when a couple of my organizing pals suggested turning the rally into a march, I had to be the one to start that. So I suggested going for a walk over by the administration building. On the way, we started chanting "No more budget cuts! Save our classes!" It sounded good. The problem, I realized, is that there's no way around the building - access on the east side is cut off by a fence. The easiest and most direct way to get from the south side of the building back to the center of campus (where we started from) is to walk through the middle of the building - through the cavernous mall-like promenade, on either side of which three stories of administrative offices rise and loom. So I decided to invite the crowd to come see the interior of the administration building, and they decided they would keep shouting, all the way through the building. That was fun.

depressed? oppressed?

On Friday I was talking with a friend on campus about my lack-of-employment prospects at the university. As happens, the topic of the general condition of the university came up. My friend said the university is suffering from depression.

This struck me two conflicting ways. On the one hand, it's as good a diagnosis as any for the overall malaise and incredibly low morale among faculty and staff. Budget cuts, hostile relations between administration and other constituencies on campus, strategic efforts to divide and to cast a pall of doubt, confusion, and mistrust - all of this has had the predictably effect of making most people who are aware of the situation despair. In public meetings about the situation, most faculty and staff are dumbstruck. No, strike that. Most faculty and staff don't go to these public meetings, because most of them, though aware of the terrible straits we're in, are paralyzed with fear, or with whatever it is that convinces them to keep blinders on, do their work, and imagine that their quiet acquiescence will keep them safe.

They do what they do because they feel they have to do it, to avoid the repercussions they have heard of or witnessed others suffering for standing up a little. This makes sense, because most people don't want to be yelled at by people with more power than they have, and almost no one really wants to be fired. Subjectively, they may not feel themselves to be depressed at all - nor perhaps fearful, over-stressed, or over-worked.

But if we accept the premise that an organization can have a general level of well-being, and that, as a complex system, it can have a set of attributes constituted by the interactions of its members, then the university could be depressed, even if a handful of individual faculty or staff (or administrators) aren't depressed themselves - and more to the point, even if they don't recognize the organization's depression.

I ran a quick Google search this morning trying to find something cogent written about this phenomenon, with no real luck. (I'm not particularly interested in organizational change in response to the Great Depression, for instance.) What I did find was a checklist of symptoms, causes, and treatments written by a "corporate coach," which in many respects doesn't apply to universities.

That led to my second reaction, which is to remember that the whole notion of a corporate organization having attributes of this sort is linked to the ideology of the corporation being a person - that dangerous legal fiction so central to US corporate law.* Diagnosing the university as depressed, taking that systematic view, psychologizing and even medicalizing the situation, shifts this discourse in ways that are a little disturbing. For one thing, they offer a rationale for avoiding political confrontation that might in the end be our best hope.

What if, unlike human beings suffering depression, this diagnosis misidentifies what is better called oppression? The two conditions call for two very different reactions, I believe. Depression calls for treatment - pharmaceutical, cognitive, psychotherapeutic, electro-shock, instituionalization,... - to make the patient better. Depression treatments in the capitalist medical context are inextricably linked to an ideology of individual responsibility and productivity, in service to capital accumulation. Why cure it for the sake of maintaining the status quo of economic and political relations? Oppression calls for resistance, developing solidarity and power, direct action and regime change.

I suppose most oppressed people suffer depression. But a lot is at stake in identifying whether the cause is institutional "depression" or political oppression.

*(And now, part of me is considering the ways in which the human person is an anthropocentric fiction which is employed across many disciplines for assigning attributes, especially praiseworthy and blameworthy ones, to the complex organizations we are. For an individual human person, depression is a felt subjective condition and orientation to the world, but it's not clear to me that the neurons and chemical reactions in my brain experience themselves as depressed, and I'm not sure what it means to the teeming bacteria throughout my body or the cells of my body which are not entirely genetically my own.)

new song

This is one of those less and less rare instances of a Paper Cats song I wrote both music and lyrics for. (I'm playing 12-string and electric guitars - double tracked, mind you; Lauren is, of course, singing.)

To The Sunrise

I was caught in a tangle
of twilight and daydreams
spending myself
on just getting by
doesn't the wind
sound lonely tonight?

The more that I looked back
the more that I stumbled
and mumbled myself
and forgot to look up
doesn't the wind
sound sadly tonight?

CHORUS

maybe the garden will grow us
a flower

VERSE

The more that I looked back
the more that I stumbled
and mumbled myself
and forgot to look up
doesn't the wind
sound sadly tonight?


But nobody's watching
and nobody cares
and nobody matters
and nobody's here
wouldn't the wind
hold you closely tonight?

CHORUS

maybe the garden will grow us
a flower
maybe the sunrise will give us
a day

job search begins

Having heard from my interim department chair that, by current plans handed down by college deans, there will be no work in the department for me next year. So I'm looking for work. I hate that.

I looked through the American Philosophical Association's Jobs for Philosophers publication this afternoon. It didn't take long. I found 5 jobs I have a reasonable fit for, and 4 of them where I might actually be considered, perhaps.

I never wanted to come to California. I didn't like the Central Valley when I got here, and, truth be told, there's a lot about it not to like. Some crappy things have happened to me here, too.

But through the years, especially the past 6 or so, I've fallen in love with my campus, and with California, and of course with Lauren, and this has made being here not merely tolerable, but a life worth living. Now, I don't want to leave California. I may not have the choice. In academia, you get to choose what you get your degree in, you get some choice of what you study, a little choice of what you teach, but virtually no choice where you live.

Dusted off my CV a bit this afternoon, too. Surprisingly, it's mainly up to date. I don't seem to have a letter of application anywhere, so tomorrow I'll be writing that up. Ugh.

the awesome leadership of Governor Schwarzenegger

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

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

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

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

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

civility

Yesterday we went to a meeting called by the academic senate executive committee to discuss collegiality, civility, and shared governance. To the dismay of some faculty there, two administrators showed up. Some felt that put a chill on discussion. (In the free speech world, a "chilling effect" is second to "prior restraint" in the list of speech-limitation no-nos.)

I don't think I learned much about collegiality, civility or shared governance, and I don't think the administrators there did, either. There was a little, exceedingly polite, venting of frustration with the way shared governance is being practiced (or not practiced) on the campus.

One thing I did notice was the uneven distribution of faculty representation at the meeting. The colleges of business administration and of humanities and social sciences were over-represented, compared to their population on campus, I think, and for certain the colleges of natural science, art, human and health sciences, and education were under-represented. (No one from art or education.)

I'm left with a question about what the attendance means. Fatigue? Morale so low these faculty don't believe there's any hope? Misrecognition? Lack of legitimacy of current faculty leadership (this one's hard to believe given the overwhelming votes in support of faculty leadership as recently as the fall general faculty meeting)? Fear of reprisals?

one thing

It's been quite a while since I added an item to my ongoing series

Doc Nagel's Top 100 Things

11. Melons. I just love 'em.

This morning I cut open what will likely be our last melon of the season. It's a small, "seedless" watermelon. It's been in storage a while, I can tell, because it's not as bright, the flesh isn't as clean and smooth, and there's just a hint of the beginning of fermentation in the sugar. Still, a good, sweet watermelon, on October 4, is nothing to dismiss.

I believe there are more than a dozen common melon varieties, many hybrids created from the basic melons. As a kid, I knew two, and only two: cantaloupe (which my mom always called "musk melon") and watermelon. I didn't encounter honeydew until I was in college. My favorite has always been watermelon. In fact, I don't understand people not liking watermelon. They make me wonder.

Lately, we've been alternating melons: watermelon one week, cantaloupe the next, then another watermelon, an orange flesh melon (which I think is a cantaloupe/honeydew hybrid), then watermelon, then a sharlyn, then another watermelon,... Occasionally, we'll grab the odd canary or crenshaw, or even a yellow watermelon.

One of the best things to do with melon is to cut them open, scrape the seeds out (of the "true melons"), and stuff your face with them. Another good thing to do is to carve them with a melon baller, then wrap each ball of melon with prosciutto, put them on a stick, and drizzle them with a reduction of good balsamic vinegar, a little sugar, and perhaps something like ruby port (all reduced to a thick syrup). Then stuff your face with them.

10. Fruit stands. I just love 'em.

Our local favorite fruit stand has already undergone its annual metamorphosis from summer fruit-a-rama-thon to pumpkin oasis, which is the first signal that they'll be closed for the season all too soon. We stop by for fruit generally twice a week from May to October, and essentially don't buy fruit from anywhere else except a farmers' market during that period. Then the bastards shutter up and go away from Halloween on, and we enter that dark, desperate period during which we plod hopelessly up and down the produce aisles, looking for anything that resembles actual food.

But don't cry for us, those of you living in climates that don't grow fresh fruits and vegetables for roughly 10 months of the year (except that, really, we can grow vegetables the other 2 months, too). We make do, somehow, with our recent memories of fruits gone by.

Ah, watermelon! We hardly knew ye!

my philosophy of life

Sometimes, people ask me, "Hey, Doc Nagel! What's your philosophy of life?"

(See, because I'm a philosophy instructor.)

And when I answer, I say:

One of my favorite ways to spend time is, if I'm getting into an elevator, and I'm the only person in the elevator car, when the doors close, I wedge myself between two walls of the elevator car, and I shimmy up the sides until I'm braced up against the side walls up on the ceiling of the elevator, and I hang on up there, and wait. Then, when the elevator is called to a floor, and the doors open, and someone looks inside and sees me hanging up on the ceiling of the elevator car, they have that moment of hesitation, that moment of doubt. They're not sure what's going on. For all they know, I might be a criminal mastermind in the middle of a jewel heist, or I might be a crazed knife murderer who has a fetish for elevator riders, or I might be a psychiatric patient who has stopped taking his meds. They don't know I'm just a nut who likes hanging out on the ceilings of elevators.

It makes an impact.

Suddenly, their worlds have been altered, irrevocably. The world, for them, is now a place where they can't be sure they won't wait for an elevator, only to have the doors open to show them there's a guy on the ceiling, staring down at them.

They have to wonder about the world now, at least for a while. If a simple elevator ride can turn out to be such an incongruous experience, well, what next?

After a while, people stop asking.

furlough - day 2

My letter of the (furlough) day is to Chancellor Reed of the CSU. Faculty, especially in the CFA, have a lot of questions about Reed's leadership of the CSU and his commitment to fighting for funding for the CSU. So I decided I'd ask.

One important thing about this letter, from my perspective, is that it demonstrates my ability to communicate in writing - an important job skill I'll be counting on once I need to look for another form of employment.

***

Mr. Charles B. Reed
Chancellor, California State University
401 Golden Shore
Long Beach, CA 90802

September 28, 2009

Dear Chancellor Reed,

I am a full-time lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at California State University, Stanislaus – just one of the 23 underfunded campuses in the CSU system. I have taught here for eleven years, and contributed my time and energy to the university through uncompensated scholarship and service, just like many of my fellow lecturer colleagues routinely do.

Today is my second furlough day this academic year. I am taking the time today to write to you urging that you take a more active role advocating for the good of the CSU. Let me remind you of your words when announcing the higher education funding “compact” you agreed to with Governor Schwarzenegger:

“Gov. Schwarzenegger is to be congratulated for his exceptionally strong commitment to higher education, particularly given that the state still is experiencing fiscal difficulties. He clearly knows CSU’s and UC’s impact on the state’s economy, and recognizes that to keep the state strong, higher education must continue to produce graduates for the workforce and to provide research capabilities and community service that benefit the state and its residents,” said CSU Chancellor Reed.

This quotation, from the CSU press release of May 11, 2004, indicates your belief that the Governor understands the importance of the CSU to our students and to the state’s economy and fiscal well-being. However, it now appears that the CSU is not a significant spending priority for the governor at all. The governor, and the legislature, must be made to account for these decisions.

Instead, the CSU has offered employee furloughs and increased student fees. These are not solutions for the CSU’s long-term funding.

You, more than anyone else, are in a position to speak on behalf of the CSU. You, more than anyone else, should understand the significant role the CSU plays in the economic and social well-being of all Californians.

You are tasked with being a steward for the interests of the entire California State University system. This means, I believe, that you have a responsibility to advocate the common interest of the students, faculty, staff, and administrators of the CSU. That common interest is stated well in the Mission of the California State University:

• To advance and extend knowledge, learning, and culture, especially throughout California.
  
• To provide opportunities for individuals to develop intellectually, personally, and professionally.
  
• To prepare significant numbers of educated, responsible people to contribute to California's schools, economy, culture, and future.
  
• To encourage and provide access to an excellent education to all who are prepared for and wish to participate in collegiate study.
  

Chancellor Reed, I submit to you that respect for this mission demands a commitment to work to fully fund the CSU. Do not allow the CSU budget to be slashed still further. Join the California Faculty Association in support of AB 656, to provide a guaranteed and predictable revenue stream for higher education in California. Demonstrate your support for the CSU, and your own stewardship of the CSU.