New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Justice (in addition to charity) for adjuncts

Sign the Petition.

I would cry "shame!" if I thought it would do any good

Death of an adjunct:

Meanwhile, I called Adult Protective Services right after talking to Margaret Mary, and I explained the situation. I said that she had just been let go from her job as a professor at Duquesne, that she was given no severance or retirement benefits, and that the reason she was having trouble taking care of herself was because she was living in extreme poverty. The caseworker paused and asked with incredulity, "She was a professor?" I said yes. The case- worker was shocked; this was not the usual type of person for whom she was called in to help.

Of course, what the case-worker didn't understand was that Margaret Mary was an adjunct professor, meaning that, unlike a well-paid tenured professor, Margaret Mary worked on a contract basis from semester to semester, with no job security, no benefits and with a salary of between $3,000 and just over $3,500 per three-credit course....

Figlio responds to Criticism

I wrote the lead-author, David Figlio, of the piece that Ed and I have critically discussed. He responded promptly and helpfully to my questions (and piece). In particular, he emphasized that "by universal agreement, I was the only person to ever handle raw data, so Morty [Schapiro--ES] could never see individual student or faculty member names, or even departments." I quote the rest of his response in full:

We haven't yet controlled for class size, but I am certain, given the Northwestern circumstance, that what you propose won't be the driving force here. An initial view of the distribution of class sizes between long-term lecturers and tenure-track faculty showed that they have a high degree of overlap. We are in the process of trying a variety of additional sample splits; however, I can assure you that every specification we attempted yielded the same fundamental conclusion.

A question about that Northwestern teaching quality study

Prompted by Ed's excellent piece, I looked at the NBER working paper that undoubtedly will be used to undermine tenure at a variety of universities. It is worth noting that one of the authors of the piece is the current President of Northwestern University; undoubtedly this helped with gaining access to the data. But it also makes one wonder if, perhaps, there wasn't a directed search in the data. After all, one can get a bit too close to the subject studied. It would be nice if some independent statistician can obtain access to the raw data.

How To Avoid Studying Faculty Working Conditions

Monday, Inside Higher Ed published an article breathlessly reporting that a "major new study" [summary, pdf] conducted by three Northwestern professors for the National Bureau of Economic Research had shown that "new students at Northwestern University learn more when their instructors are adjuncts than when they are tenure-track professors." Unfortunately, the uptake by IHE and others ignores the one salient fact about Northwestern's 'adjunct' pool that the authors let creep into one of their footnotes: "[a]lmost all classes taught by non-tenure track faculty at Northwestern are taught by those with a longer-term relationship with the university" (p. 9n8 my emphasis).

The study itself is flawed in other ways: 1) the narrow basis upon which these claims are grounded; 2) the authors' failure to consider specific factors about the faculty being studied, their relationship to the courses being taught, or the contracts under they were hired; and 3) the generalizability of the results being presented. Indeed, the authors' provide very little reason to think that 'non-tenure track' faculty at Northwestern are comparable to a similarly named group of faculty at other institutions. As such, the study provides a poor rejoinder to the large body of research that suggests that adjunctification is as bad for students as it demonstrably has been for faculty. 

Precarious HE labor and health care

From the CHE. (This is not a critique of the ACA, dispute the attention-grabbing lead.)

Recent moves by colleges to cut adjunct hours in advance of the Obamacare employer mandate offer a reminder of why contingent faculty labor is the gift that keeps on giving to the corporate university: Not only do part-time adjuncts receive a fraction of the pay expected by full-timers for the same work; they also do not encumber the institution with health-care costs. A majority of today’s teaching faculty members are thus vulnerable not only to the first round of pink slips mandated by budget cuts but also to the predations of our health-care system....

"Junior members should cut their teeth on lesser subjects"

But if cattle and horses and lions had hands
or could paint with their hands and create works such as men do,
horses like horses and cattle like cattle
also would depict the gods' shapes and make their bodies
of such a sort as the form they themselves have.--Xenophanes

"Not all ethical issues are equally important. Many ethicists spend their professional lives performing in sideshows.

However entertaining the sideshow, sideshow performers do not deserve the same recognition or remuneration as those performing on our philosophical Broadways.

What really matters now is not the nuance of our approach to mitochondrial manipulation for glycogen storage diseases, or yet another set of footnotes to footnotes to footnotes in the debate about the naturalistic fallacy. It is: (a) Whether or not we should be allowed to destroy our planet (and if not, how to stop it happening); and (b) Whether or not it is fine to allow 20,000 children in the developing world to die daily of hunger and entirely avoidable disease  (and if not, how to stop it happening). My concern in this post is mainly with (a). A habitable planet is a prerequisite for all the rest of our ethical cogitation. If we can’t live here at all, it’s pointless trying to draft the small print of living....

So:  University philosophy departments should be restructured. The junior members should cut their teeth on lesser subjects such as the mind-body problem. As their experience, status and salary rises, they should increasingly specialise in problems (a) and (b). By the time they have reached the top of the tree, that’s all they should be doing. Anyone who wants to spend their lives paddling around in the philosophical shallows, along with Kant and Wittgenstein, should of course be free to do so, but should realise that it will condemn them to a life of penury and obscurity."--Charles Foster. [HT Ingrid Robeyns.]

Foster relies on the -- welcome to me (now that I am balding and greying) -- premise that philosophy has a very long apprenticeship. Let's grant this for the sake of argument and learn to ignore the purported boy-wonders in our midst (there might be other good benefits that flow from not focusing on them). Sadly, Foster does not suggests that ethical reflection requires considerable schooling in life--a point I have long been more partial to. Foster unabashedly endorses [A] a practical conception of philosophy; in fact, in the post he relies on [A] as a tacit premise because while at first he only speaks of "ethical issues," "ethicists," and "ethical cogitation," his conclusions involve the organization of philosophy an sich. This is why Foster's really important ethicist reminds me of Xenophanes' cattle and horses and lions. Foster's post (and the  subsequent discussion) is primarily useful for posting what is often said sotte vocce, especially in contexts where philosophers need to prove their usefulness. Blessed are those who work in an environment -- primarily rich private institutions -- where their philosophical lack of utility is status-enhancing!

"The working conditions of instructors are the learning conditions of students"

A guest post from Ed Kazarian:

President Obama has just released his Plan to Make College More Affordable and the critiques have been coming fast and furious (for instance). A major feature of the plan is the requirement for collecting and presenting data on student outcomes; adding a requirement for faculty work conditions data would make this a much better plan. Here's how.

Much of the student data the President is asking for—graduation rates, average debt loads and earnings of graduates, percentages of students who pursue advanced degrees, and the income levels of students who attend an institution—is already easily available and factors into many of the rankings that are currently published.

But the narrow focus on student data elides the factor that may well count the most when it comes to good student outcomes: faculty working conditions. As the slogan goes "the working conditions of teachers are the learning conditions of students."

Networked individualism (and what it means for professional philosophy as work)

Jeremy Gilbert (see also Monday's post) writes on the relation of social media networks and individualism; below the fold some reflections on his essay for the philosophy profession.

On the one hand we have  a social logic which tends towards the promotion of egalitarian collective creativity. On the other, we have an ideology which demands that we remain commited to the liberal individualist obsession with our private, interior lives and our separability from all other beings. It insists that the outputs of all such creativity - and even the condition of possibility for those outputs - manifest themselves only as forms of private property: from the ‘transferrable skill sets’ which we ‘sell’ in the labour market [*] to the carefully-defined pieces of intellectual property that are the substance of the ‘knowledge economy’.... [**]  

City College of San Francisco under attack by privatizers using accreditation agency as a front

Facebook discussion of this IHE story led Chris Newfield (blog; book) to share this message from the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education (their FB page is here) mailing list. Other links: the CCSF faculty union and the"Save CCSF" website.

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Contingent faculty, friends and allies,

Please see the letter sent today from Alisa Messer, President of AFT 2121, which represents ALL faculty (over 1,000) at City College of San Francisco. This attack, among many other things, is an attack on some of the best conditions that have been won for contingent faculty (and therefore for their students) anywhere in the USA.

Why didn't I think of this?

"As colleges begin using massive open online courses (MOOC) to reduce faculty costs, a Johns Hopkins University professor has announced plans for MOOA (massive open online administrations)." See here for more of the revolutionary cost-saving ideas by Dr. Benjamin Ginsberg. [HT Rich Booher on FB]

As colleges begin using massive open online courses (MOOC) to reduce faculty costs, a Johns Hopkins University professor has announced plans for MOOA (massive open online administrations). Dr. Benjamin Ginsberg, author of The Fall of the Faculty, says that many colleges and universities face the same administrative issues every day. By having one experienced group of administrators make decisions for hundreds of campuses simultaneously, MOOA would help address these problems expeditiously and economically. Since MOOA would allow colleges to dispense with most of their own administrators, it would generate substantial cost savings in higher education. - See more at: http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2013/06/forget_moocslets_use_mooa.html#sthash.5Ix9WnMO.

As colleges begin using massive open online courses (MOOC) to reduce faculty costs, a Johns Hopkins University professor has announced plans for MOOA (massive open online administrations). Dr. Benjamin Ginsberg, author of The Fall of the Faculty, says that many colleges and universities face the same administrative issues every day. By having one experienced group of administrators make decisions for hundreds of campuses simultaneously, MOOA would help address these problems expeditiously and economically. Since MOOA would allow colleges to dispense with most of their own administrators, it would generate substantial cost savings in higher education. - See more at: http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2013/06/forget_moocslets_use_mooa.html#sthash.5Ix9WnMO.dpuf

The Inside Candidate

Job-searches to fill permanent positions bring out the gremlins: long suppressed personal animosities; un-moored from reality-fantasies about the current significance of the department; conflicting aspirations about its future; mutually exclusive, external pressures about the required profile of the winning candidate, etc. Professional philosophers act just like humans during hiring season. Even when the gremlins remain suppressed a department can fail to spot the talent staring in its face; I have seen non-great departments pass up the realistic opportunity of hiring, say, Dave Chalmers or Alva Noë (etc.). Now, one reason why such things occur is that hiring as currently practiced in professional philosophy (and I have been affiliated with seven universities in three different countries, so I am aware of the variety of practices), tends to be largely a projection of a heteronomous soul (the department) onto a thinly covered slate (the candidate). This is why each individual hiring decision is best understood as a (unfair) lottery (and, thus, departments routinely fail to hire the best talent), even though in the aggregate there may well be some collective rationality because the list of explicit and implicit collective heuristics and biases (!) deployed track talent and effort reasonably well.

One might think that the previous paragraph is an argument for 'the inside candidate' (let's call it the 'TIC argument' or 'TIC' for short). For, the slate is then covered with a rich array of data-points. Now, anybody familiar with the long-run damage of 'nepotistic' hiring from within (name your favorite rotten European patronage system) will hesitate  to endorse TIC; but, perhaps, the previous paragraph is an argument for TIC-lite: that is, at hiring one should favor ceteribus paribus the visiting adjunct/post-doc (etc.), even granting that personalities change post-tenure/civil servant status. I would endorse good-faith TIC-lite*, in fact, as introducing more sanity into our collective hiring practices, except that (a) IF the gremlins do come out in a TIC-lite situation it can poison an otherwise healthy atmosphere and (b) being a rejected TIC-lite candidate is really just about the worst possible professional experience short of economic exploitation in professional philosophy. (Of course, experiencing harassment, racism, etc. are far worse, but I wouldn't call these "professional.")  Below the fold, I describe two first hand experiences to bring out two horrible features of TIC-lite (in my ongoing 'what it's like' for the young series). I name institutions, but (with a single exception) not individuals and I ask commentators to respect the privacy of all involved. (Well, I am a fair target, of course.)

New details on Georgia Tech outsourced education

I haven't had time to look at this in any detail, but after a quick skim, it seems that the company they are partnering with left the 'A' off their name.

Blog comments you wished you had made, vol. 4571

The key points, but do read the whole thing:

It's not helpful to make the arguments of labor’s enemies for them. So please don’t trumpet efficiency on behalf of the owners when its an argument that is almost always used as a cudgel against the rights of labor. We all know what efficiency really means: less money for labor and more for management and owners.... When management trumpets efficiency as the justification for subcontracting or any other labor practice [JP: such as changing the TT vs precarious labor ratio in HE] it's usually a front for disenfranchising labor and increasing management importance and scope.

I'm reminded of Jeff Nealon's biting and insightful "The Associate Vice-Provost in the Gray Flannel Suit" (here and here), an example of outsmarting in which he says we should welcome honest management consultants into universities, because the fat they would cut would be administration, not faculty. The trick is to find the honest management consultants!

Can academics organize around attacks on academia?

Various sorts of attacks on academia have been a theme at Newapps since the beginning: Increasing corporatization of the university, growth of administration, take-over of administration by non-academics, funding cuts, increasing student debt, uses of MOOCS that are contrary to goals of education, increasing use and abuse of adjuncts, hyper-emphasis on "evaluation", anti-intellectualism, federal attacks on academic freedom and research independence, legal attacks on faculty and graduate student organizing, and here's a new one - "outsourcing" grading to Bangalore (coming in a pilot project from a director of business law and ethics studies, as probably was just inevitable.) 

Anyway, I've been saying for some time that I'd start a thread in which we might think collectively about what can be done. Should we work within existing organizations like AAUP and APA, or give them up as hopeless?  Should we take an activist/organizing approach or focus on legislation and lobbying?  Should unionization be a focus - whether legally or not?  Creative new ideas would be most welcome.

An Open Letter to Professor Michael Sandel from the Philosophy Dept at San Jose State

The eloquent and well argued letter is here. I do not think they are being alarmist in their diagnosis of the ultimate function of this and other attacks on the traditional university.  (Let's keep discussion here to the open letter and the function of MOOCs specifically.  I'm going to start another thread today for discussion of things that we might organize publicly to resist these trends.)

Some very important teaching advice from a VAP.

Marcus Arvan at the Philosophers' Cocoon has started a new series on What it is like to be a VAP. His first post is well worth a read and resonated with my own (three, very privileged!) years as a VAP.

But what caught my attention is this remark by Arvan:

Slowly, though, things began to change for the better. I attended a teaching workshop which emphasized the "flipped classroom" -- i.e. getting students to do more work in the classroom, rather than being the "sage on the stage." My wife and mother also suggested that instead of working myself into the ground prepping for classes, I should prioritize getting students to work. I did.... It has worked wonders. My student evaluations have soared, and more importantly, my students are improving beyond my wildest dreams. Getting them to work -- to do philosophy themselves, both in the classroom and at home -- works wonders.

Recognizing something akin to this  is crucial, I think, to all great (philosophy) teaching. 

A brief question for MOOC fans

Why do you think MOOCs will lower tuition?

They might lower production costs inside the university,* but previous means of doing that (increasing ratio of adjuncts vs TT faculty) haven’t resulted in reduced tuition (far from it). Instead the increased “profit” from cost savings has been kept in-house. Why should we expect the alleged savings from MOOCs to be treated any differently?

Remember it, Jake, even if it is Louisiana

Louisiana has some much bizarre crap -- consider the horror show that is the K-12 voucher program, or the outrageous private prison industry -- that I'm often tempted to cite the last line of Chinatown.

But not this time, with this sordid bit of adminstrative overreach that provides another HE "canary in the coal mine" example: 

In the Summer of 2010, the administration of Southeastern Louisiana University announced the closure of its French program and the dismissal of three tenured faculty members, Margaret Marshall, Katherine Kolb and Evelyne Bornier, among the most highly regarded professors on campus. In violation of University guidelines and AAUP standards, the program closure was determined without consulting the faculty concerned. Nor did the program, in fact, close: French courses are still being taught; a French minor is still offered. In further violation of University policy and AAUP guidelines, these courses are being staffed by instructors, who, in cases of program closure are to be dismissed before tenured faculty. 

Trick question

What's the difference between university admins and fast food franchise owners? Ha, trick question! There is no difference.

Starting in January 2014, any employee working 30 hours or more per week will be considered a full-time faculty member and will be entitled to health insurance through an employer under new federal rules, with an exception for certain small businesses. So far, several schools have cut adjuncts' hours to avoid the requirement and save cash. Matt Williams, vice president of New Faculty Majority, a group that advocates for collective bargaining rights of adjunct instructors and professors, told The Huffington Post in November he expects this type of action to happen more often.

H/T "Cynic" in comments here.

"The working conditions of college faculty are ultimately the learning conditions for college students"

So writes Michael Bérubé, [update: citing the slogan of the New Faculty Majority], in his Presidential Address to the MLA. He reminds us that we can't let the internal rewards or "psychic wage" cover for the material conditions of many of our HE colleagues who are worse off, materially, than K-12 colleagues: "The truth, of course, is that contingent college faculty members earn lower wages, have less professional autonomy, and endure significantly greater job insecurity than unionized teachers in the K–12 system." On this point, see the Adjunct Project. And here also.

Speaking of K-12, t wouldn't hurt to recall this point I'm fond of making, and start thinking in terms of K-16: 

asshole academia?

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a nice discussion of UC Irvine philosopher Aaron James' recent Asholes: A Theory.

James argues that what is characteristic of assholes is that they systematically "act out of a deep-rooted sense of entitlement, a habitual and persistent belief that they deserve special treatment." He develops a typology of different kinds of assholes, and also theorizes about the rise of "asshole capitalism," which is where:

"Are you gay?"

I was asked the question in the title of this post during the closing moments of an Eastern APA job interview. I  believe I stammered "that's illegal," but maybe I only thought of that response in the bar later. In reality the conversation continued with the Chair of the department  after the interview and that was even less edifying. (I have shared more unprofessional interview moments here.) This by way of calling attention to our friends at Feminist Philosophy, who are having an important discussion about what to do in situations like the one I encountered. Those with wise council (I don't have any, alas) or in need of it should join in there.

A colleague in the discipline had warned me against the department with whom the 'are-you-gay-incident' occurred. (I was, in fact, trying to replace that person, but did not receive an 'on-campus-interview.') Given the deplorable situation on the professional philosophy junior/tenure-track job-market, we often forget that interviews are two-way encounters. Departments should be mindful that they are also 'selling' themselves not just to people desperate for a decent paying job in philosophy, but also to future professional colleagues in the discipline. I sometimes wonder if I will ever bump into the  self-described "philosopher of economics" who asked me the question about my sexual orientation/sense of self. I imagine the conversation starts with, "Actually, we have met before. You may not recall..."

You have to be narcissistic and regularly tap into your inner anger to succeed at blogging. Given that professional philosophy has treated me extremely generously during most of my career, my blogging floats along happily on my narcissism. But sometimes what animates my blogging are the memories of the many unprofessional experiences undergone and witnessed....

Will There Always Be Tenure?

Over on Leiter Reports, Amy Ferrer, newly appointed as executive director of the American Philosophical Association, has been writing a series of guest posts on the latest prospect for tenure track positions in North America. “According to much of public opinion, and unfortunately according to some in power in universities and our nation’s legislatures, tenured professors are paid too much to work too little, and can’t be removed from duty even if they’re doing a terrible job,” she writes. Currently, ¾ of teaching staff in post-secondary institutions are employed “off the tenure-track” and “The median pay per course, standardized to a three-credit course, was $2,700 in fall 2010 and ranged in the aggregate from a low of $2,235 at two-year colleges to a high of $3,400 at four-year doctoral or research universities,” according to a report from the Coalition of Academic Workers.

These are shocking trends, and it is perhaps natural to blame the poor economic climate and cling to the hope that things will turn around soonish. Of course, there is the right wing resurgence and that doesn’t bode too well. And as we saw, Ms. Ferrer puts some of the blame on public opinion. But surely things can't stay as bad as they have been for the last three years.

Hmm, yes . . . but this neglects one rather obvious fact.

Changing our frame of reference from "job market" to "political economy of philosophy instruction"

Th Dec 6, 5 pm CST: I'm moving this post back up as it's received some important comments from Ed Kazarian, in response to a comment I made at Leiter Reports to a post by Amy Ferrer, the Executive Director of the APA. By the way, all of Ferrer's posts at LR deserve reading. 

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The past month (September 2011) we've had a series of interesting and informative posts on preparing graduate students to enter what is commonly called "the job market." The presupposition here is that the job market in philosophy begins post-PhD. 

I don't want to criticize the content of the posts; as far as I can tell, the advice has been excellent. But I do want to suggest that we change our frame of reference on these matters, and specify that we have been discussing only a small segment of the complete system of employment for philosophy instruction in institutions of higher education. So I'd like to suggest we call the analysis of the complete system "the political economy of philosophy instruction." 

On Preparing PhD Students to become undergraduate teachers

Teaching is Not Magic.  I'm stealing this motto from my fellow-blogger, Michael Cholbi.  Teaching is not some magical thing that one has innately or that one "gets" or that one gets the hang of after a few years of exposure.  Most philosophers are rightly skeptical of scholarly literature in what one might call "education studies."  But thankfully, philosophy has its own association of philosophy teachers (the AAPT) and its own journal (Teaching Philosophy) that both share that skepticism and recognize that good teaching is at the very least not something that every philosopher should have to figure out on her own and that it should be informed by argument, reason and evidence.  Its not good enough to point one's graduate students to these resources.  Graduate programs should be centrally involved in the AAPT and in Teaching Philosophy, because arguably, Ph.D programs are most responsible for the students who have learned the most.  Share the wealth, folks - how did you do it?--Rebecca Copenhaver, In Socrates' Wake.

Copenhaver's post is focused primarily on the North American situation (in my neck of the woods PhD bursaries are employees not "students," etc.), but her reflections apply more widely. The post reminded me of the weaknesses of my graduate education and also, alas, the shortcomings of my current practice as a supervisor. Anyway, I encourage everybody involved in PhD programs in philosophy to go read her whole post.

A Sokal Hoax in Mathematics, or is it Vanity Publishing?

Neil Levy kindly called my attention to the story: "A paper by Marcie Rathke of the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople had been provisionally accepted for publication in Advances in Pure Mathematics. ‘Independent, Negative, Canonically Turing Arrows of Equations and Problems in Applied Formal PDE’." As LRB reports, "The paper was created using Mathgen, an online random maths paper generator." Unfortunately, "Neither Marcie Rathke nor the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople is willing to pay the ‘processing charges’ levied by Advances in Pure Mathematics, so we will never know if the work would actually have made it to publication." The exchange between 'author' and journal is priceless.

So, what did this hoax expose? LRB concludes the following:

Academic journals depend on peer review to ensure the rigour and value of submissions. The less prestigious the journal, the harder it is to find competent reviewers and the lower they will have to set the threshold, until at some point we arrive at, essentially, accept-all-comers vanity publishing. The murkier the business model and the lower the standards outside the mainstream, the harder it is for academics to challenge the status of the prestige journals, locking academics into the situation Glen Newey describes.

 

K-16 teacher solidarity

This little Facebook post, provoked by the Chicago Teachers Union strike (a nice post by Brian Leiter will get you started; see also here and here), got some good reactions, so I thought I'd put it here. 

Public university colleagues: let's start thinking in terms of K-16, so that we highlight our solidarity with our K-12 colleagues. Because we are the leading edge, the experimental subjects, of "flexible" labor practices for our TAs, adjuncts, instructors, and other colleagues forced into precarious labor, just as our K-12 colleagues are sites of experimentation for tying evaluations to standardized testing. The admins in each area look longingly at the practices of the other. In other words, we are each canaries in the other's coal mine.

CTU solidarity fund here; other support ideas here.

Political Affect: it's killing you

One of the things I focus on is "political affect." It's a multi-valent concept; one of the registers in which it works is psycho-somatic effects of political economic conditions. This article summarizes research which details the bad health effects of chronic job insecurity: 

Research shows that the purgatory of job insecurity may be even worse for you than unemployment. And it's turning the American Dream into a sleepwalking nightmare. From young temporary workers to middle-aged career veterans, Americans are being pushed to their physical and psychological limits in what has the makings of a major national public health crisis.

To turn this back to politics in the restricted sense, we should recall the classic distinction between anxiety and fear. Anxiety is free-floating arousal; fear is targeted. You're anxious about the dark and afraid of an approaching attack dog.

Consider then the brutality of contemporary US politics (and don't be so smug, my non-US friends; it's coming your way, sound bites and attack ads and all). If anxiety is worse than fear, anxiety-gripped people will be prone to accept the bogeys on offer by politicians, because at least you can focus your fear / hatred on a bogey, whereas with systemic insecurity, all you can do is suffer. So better to focus on some chimeric Islamomexikenyanian-gay-sex-having-and-abortion-loving-latte-sipping-arugula-eating-unionized-public-school-teacher-cultural-elite-who-are-sapping-and-impurifying-our-precious-bodily-fluids than to have to think your way through the anxiety to the social system that makes you insecure.

Or better, the contemporary political discourse blocks the path to an intellectual understanding of systematic insecurity by its relentless individualism and shaming, its victim-blaming. "Insecure? what a loser! You should have picked a better career."

Recently fired LSU Systems President John Lombardi's fable

Some background. The annual value of targeted tax rebates and cuts in the gret state of Louisiana are now over 7 and a half billion dollars, around a third of the actual state budget, an amount that dwarfs higher education spending. These rebates are often political giveaways that make absolutely no sense, such as Walmart getting one and a half cent per dollar rebate on sales tax remittances.

Also note that the State of Louisiana has the 21st highest GDP of any state in the United States. Given the size of the population, were it a country it would be in the tiny minority of the wealthiest countries in the world. But it suffers the curse of mineral wealth, which is why one of the richest states in the country has the greatest income disparity, greatest poverty, highest per capita prison population, least funded education system, etc. etc. etc.

This information shows just how astute Lombardi's "fable" is (story HERE; please take the time to read it; it's very entertaining).

The last four years under Jindal began with a huge tax cut that rendered the code more regressive, and then continued with an even greater orgy of perpetual targeted tax giveaways. The money lost through these policies have been largely recouped through perpetual cuts to higher education. Some of it has been made up for in tuition and fee increases (four years ago the state funding/tuition plus fees ration was 6 to 4, but now that's reversed), but schools across the state have  fired tenure track faculty, sometimes after declaring exigency, sometimes not. There have been no merit raises for the whole time and for the foreseeable future. And hiring freezes are the norm.

And now, if the current round of proposed cuts actually go through, flagship campus LSU would have to do the equivalent of closing two of its colleges. 

It's just a fact that there is a business cycle, and if you cut taxes every time it's high and cut services every time it's low, then at some point things are going to get very ugly. I think that we are on the edge of this in Louisiana, and in fact would be over the cliff were it not for Federal welfare programs such as Social Security and Medicare putting money in middle class hands.