Blaming the faculty yet again

So I'm not completely sure what it is about professors that makes other professionals despise them so much. Maybe it's their narcissistic smug superiority, a characteristic that makes me despise spending time with many academics. Whatever it is, it may lead to the end of what's good about university life, because it seems like activists from the "liberal media" through to conservative bloggers are determined to make college faculty members into hyper controlled high school teachers, with no time for research or the life of the mind. Only teach what we can measure empirically. We live in a society that has fallen so in love with corporate capitalism, even though it has royally screwed most of us at least as often as it has helped us, that we refuse to allow that there are things we do, like police, healthcare, and education that probably shouldn't be profit driven.

Today, the New York Times questioned why college tuition goes up even in a recession, and never goes down. This is certainly a question I would like an answer to, but I'm baffled as to why the New York Times focuses the first part of the article on how cutting university costs is so difficult because of those pain-in-the-ass faculty (instead of wealthy donors or over-paid bureaucrats, let's say). So, damn those faculty because they fight for a life of the mind, for intellectual engagement that may not have tangible measures, like profit, but has other measures of success. So damn those professors for keeping us from cutting the art budget, which is expensive and brings in no wealthy donor alums.

On the other hand, let's never question why most private colleges spend so much money on sports, when very few sports are a profit revenue except at large schools (most $50,000/year small private liberal arts college spend a lot of money on sports that they certainly "lose" money on; though personally I think it's good the students have the sports to play and engage them physically. I think it's often money well spent, but it's not "profitable."). And let's not question that schools need large bureaucracies and overpaid bureaucrats, or that parents expect their children to have access to top-of-the-line technology, and professors are all expected now to teach in powerpoint and online. No, instead, let's question the comparatively small part of college and university budgets that pay for faculty to take research leave, or let's focus on the fact that professors only teach a few classes a semester. Surely they can teach more classes.

Of course, most faculty, even those at liberal arts colleges where they only teach two or three classes a semester, work 60 hours per week between teaching, working with students, and service to the university; that doesn't include their research time, which they are expected to do to get tenure (which most people working in the academy can no longer aspire to because 50% of professors teaching teach as adjuncts or contract laborers, and not as these tenured faculty anyways), but which the New York Times seems to think is fun hobby work that doesn't really make faculty into better teachers (yeah, I would certainly prefer learning biology from a sixty-year-old professor who still teaches from the biology textbook he learned from forty years earlier in graduate school). And they certainly don't get paid what a less well-educated lawyer or corporate executive gets paid. And the only reason a college professor teaches (especially in the sciences) instead of doing something else more lucrative is to have time in the winter, the summer, and every seven years to do more research, to keep up with their field. So, let's just eliminate the incentive for great scholars to teach as well, and maybe that will fix the university system in this country that we all think needs so much repair. Wouldn't it be better if all those smug brainiacs went and worked in finance too so we could tank the world economy that much faster next time?

And one more thing, I like how the New York Times and others care about the high cost of quality private education now that it is pricing upper middle class students how and hitting their pocketbooks. Twenty years ago, even public education became beyond the reach of much of the lower middle class, but now we have to fix these super expensive private schools because well-to-do parents may have to send their kids to the local public college instead.

Universities do cost more than they should, and there are a million reasons for that, a million things that could and should be changed about that, but why are faculty the first targets of all criticism? They are not likable people, but they are more often than not, hardworking and caring teachers whose research life makes them better at teaching students. There is another danger about really good faculty as James Baldwin observed a long time ago; if they teach too well, then yes, people do tend to question the things about society that are unjust or don't work. So, maybe we should pay faculty less to teach more. Maybe then everyone in this country will get the quality of education that will truly make the U.S. the idiocracy it is already becoming. Well at least we won't have to talk about those pain-in-the-ass, life-of-the-mind faculty since they will no longer exist.

Where was the welfare plan when we needed it?

The list of things I wish my tax money did not pay for is so long, war in Iraq, Afghanistan, most of the defense department, most of the corporations that work for the defense department, etc. What I don't mind paying for, public education, road repair, social security, medicare, and welfare, are the things half the country seems to hate paying for. My question now, as President Bush himself warns of economic disaster, is do I really want my tax money paying to bail out these huge investment firms. I do not. Having read and listened to other significant economic thinkers on the subject (like the wonderful 9/19/08 program on Bill Moyers Journal), I am not certain our tax dollars can actually save the faltering financial system. Oddly, I find myself sounding like a more traditional Republican, we should allow them to go out of business because the time to use the $700 billion has passed. Where was that money when ordinary people were losing their homes? Where was corporate welfare when it could have saved ordinary people and not Wall Street? A year ago we could have saved this financial system if we also brought in tools for greatly increased regulation. But since we have a deregulated financial system, it should be allowed to fail in a deregulated fashion. More than that, I am certain that several people have done some illegal things somewhere, so CEOs and other prominent executives of these companies should be arrested, their assets liquidated, and all that money should be put toward bailing out the industry they screwed up with their idiocy and greed. But greed is human nature, which is why some people aren't libertarians - human greed cannot be trusted to moderate itself. The time to pass this sort of reformation on the finance industry also has passed, and as Ron Suskind reminds us, the warning bells were Enron if only we had had an administration who would listen. But at least their colossal screw-up allowed me to be amused by this phony spam message.


If we do bail out the financial system, as we inevitably will since both political parties are owned by Wall Street, let's hope it's with careful government oversight that builds in safeguards against corporate and government greed. This government must do more than bailout the current financial system; it must rebuild it as something other than it has been.

By the way, I bet you wish we hadn't gone into Iraq now because where are we going to get $700 billion? China. And then we are in debt to a not-very-nice rising superpower, throughout our generations forever.