My Very First Rally--Also, On the Irony of Millionaire Marxists

[You can see my head hunched over a typewriter in the lower left-hand corner].

I've always wanted to be in a rally, so scratch that one off the bucket list.

The Background: Recently, the Iowa Board of Regents proposed to once again raise tuition and grad student fees.  Hijinks ensued.

Things weren't helped by university president Sally Mason, she of the perpetual foot in mouth (just last year, she said that aiming for zero campus rapes was probably unrealistic, given "human nature."  That did not go over well).  This year, when she was confronted by the complaint that the average Iowa student-debt load was sixth-highest in the country, she claimed student-debt was all just a matter of "lifestyle," what with the kids these days buying their laptops and iphones and so forth.  That also did not go over so well.

This prompted a cheeky classmate of mine to make flyers reading things like: "Hey!  I saved hundreds of dollars by trading in my laptop for a $5 typewriter!  Sally Mason was right, I guess student debt really is just a matter of lifestyle!" or "I dropped my phone bill down to practically nothing by just training a carrier pigeon instead!  Thanks Sally Mason!"  Other folks also pointed out that adjusted for inflation, in 1972 (when Mason graduated) most public universities were far better funded, tuition far lower, and the minimum wage higher, than in 2014.  You'd think a Science PhD like Mason would be better at math (but then, she was a biologist...that one's for you, David Harris!).

It's also a little gauche for a president who makes nearly half-million a year and lives in a paid-for mansion to critique working students.

Anyhoo, these things came to a head on Wednesday, when the grad-student Union held a rally on campus.  All the standard tropes were there: the pre-made signs, the slogans, the rhyming chants, the speakers shouting into a megaphone--is it bad that I kept thinking about how this reminded me of every '60s-movie ever?  Like, maybe we need to innovate new rally tropes so that they feel less like easily-ignorable background noise?

Not that it was all cliche--the organizers also set out a string of $5 typewriters for us to type on during the rally.  I found that clever.  I repeatedly typed "REPLACE ADMINISTRATION WITH ADJUNCTS" and "ADJUNCTIFY SALLY MASON" on mine.

And in any case, maybe these old tropes still work--next day, the Board of Regents voted to extend the tuition freeze.  They didn't reference the rally, but then, hey, why would they? 

What I found more interesting was how the rally-organizers explicitly connected tuition-spikes to global warming--the thinking was that college grads with massive debt will take any job they can get, including with the very industries that most pollute the Earth, and thus will be more likely to keep their heads low and not ask questions or protest in order to snag those desperately-needed jobs.  The endless tuition-hikes, then, are part of a coordinated government/industry collusion to cow the larger populace into submission.  A conspiracy theory perhaps--but then, just because you're paranoid don't mean they're not after you.

But today at least, the students won.

For now, anyways.

For there are still far larger institutional and cultural problems at play here, I've realized.  Case in point, the next day I attended an award ceremony at the old capital building on campus.  Renowned Marxist literary-scholar Frederic Jameson was given a prestigious award, which included a check for $30,000.  Jameson was a fascinating speaker and a living legend, so I'm glad I went (especially since, at 80, he's not much longer for this world).  But his words are not what have stuck with me since yesterday: rather, it was his introduction, which included a long catalog of all the many other prestigious cash awards he's gotten over the course of his career--including a recent one from the Kingdom of Norway for $750,000.  Jameson also teaches at Duke, which means he pulls a six-figure salary at least.

In other words, this Marxist scholar is surely a millionaire--and, like all rich people, we reward his wealth by showering him with yet more wealth.  We don't even give the money to some young and rising scholar or long-neglected writer who could surely use the encouragement and financial help, but instead to someone at the end of his career who already has more accolades and cash than he surely knows what to do with.  I also couldn't help but note the low-wage caterers that weaved silently and unnoticed throughout the reception area.

We in the English discipline tend to celebrate our sophistication and critical eye, but there was a distinct lack of self-awareness last night, a failure to see the intense irony of showering money on a millionaire Marxist critic of all people, amidst ostentatious displays of institutional wealth.

It's easy to critique Sally Mason and the Board of Regents, you see--but when we fail to acknowledge our own complicity, things get stickier.

One More Academic Rant

Re: those commentators who equate academics complaining about the adjunctification of their profession to starving, aspiring musicians, artists, athletes, etc; and worse, justify supply-and-demand as intrinsic goods.

Unlike musicians, artists, athletes, etc, our economy and society actually needs college professors to function and survive.  We've made a BA a necessity in our current economy, which means record numbers of people have to attend college, which means we need more qualified professors than ever.  Professors are highly trained, highly educated professionals who should be compensated as such.  Poorly-paid adjuncts do not have the time, energy, office space, nor abilities to meet with individual students and help them the way they need--therefore, making most professors adjuncts delivers an inferior education to our rising generation of workers and leaders, thereby jeopardizing our economy's future.  Failure to support educators (and this goes for the K-12 level, too) is a fundamental failure in long-term investment.  The analogy to artists is a false one (how unsurprising, that those who don't support fixing education are bad at analogies and critical thought).

"Supply and Demand" are another common hand-wavy, post hoc justification for adjunctification, as though unregulated, laissez-faire Supply-Side economics wasn't responsible for millions in Southeast Asia sweltering in sweatshops at 0.14-cents/hour, 14-hours a day with no benefits in virtual slavery, with no hope of schooling, saving, or getting ahead, or even eating more than once a day.  That is, Supply and Demand is a force for great oppression and suffering and evil in this world--it is an engine that must be regulated with breaks and transmission--it is a nuclear chain reaction that must be carefully contained in a reactor or it will destroy everything.

I hate to break it to you, but folks acting in their own best self-interest does not actually improve outcomes for everyone, but--surprise!--only for the self-interested.  I have as my evidences all those aforementioned millions of sweat-shop workers in Asia making our clothes (and don't feed me any bull about how we're giving them jobs they otherwise wouldn't have had in a low-cost-of-living country--we have taken advantage of their desperation and starvation by virtually enslaving them; ain't we virtuous), as well as the exploited farm workers in the U.S., the laid-off manufacturing workers in the Rust Belt, and the adjuncts in our Universities.  Why is it that the people who do the actual work necessary for human civilization are the ones paid the worst?  Our priorities are backwards, and we will pay the price for it.

Just as there is no such thing as Santa Claus, there is no such thing as an "Invisible Hand" that will magically transmute your selfishness into altruism.  Ayn Rand was wrong.  Her ideas were fiction--serious, they have no correspondence with reality (I need no better defense of English than this: we actually know fiction when we see it).  Your gross mis-reading of Adam Smith is also wrong--the deeply-cynical Smith only coined the phrase "Invisible Hand" to refer to how everyone trying to screw everyone over lessons the impact of only a few people screwing everyone over (again, I need no better defense of English than this: we actually read the books everyone cites--and we note what these books actually say, not what you think it says).

Now, certain things should be privatized, certain things should be run more efficiently like a business--Space Travel, for instance.  I am legitimately excited for Space X to send human beings into outer space for a fraction of the cost of pork-barrel NASA.  I am also genuinely excited for Tesla to lead the revolution on all-electric cars, as they have already paid back their government loan with interest (now if only our electrical sources were as green!).  But certain things should not be run like a business.  Universities are one of them.  Bloating administrative staff while part-timing the teachers who do the actual work defeats the whole point of a college.  Stop it.

"But that's just the way things are right now..."  And ISIS is beheading American journalists and enslaving ethnic minorities in northern Iraq, that's just the way things are right now, too.  But they shouldn't be.  If we want to claim any moral superiority over ISIS whatsoever (Guantanamo Bay doesn't provide much of a counter-argument), then we need a similar mass-military-level mobilization for combating the evils of exploitation--in our colleges, in our agriculture, in our clothing manufacture.  We are jeopardizing our future economy, our domestic stability (every nation is only 9 meals away from revolution--food scarcity helped spark the Arab Spring, for example), and our civilization.

I have noticed that many adherents to the cult of the Invisible Hand are also Church-going Christians.  Speaking of books many people cite without actually reading, I am currently in the middle of the Old Testament, and I can testify, that sexual sin (the current cause célèbre of most contemporary moralists) receives numerically far fewer Biblical condemnations than the oppression of the poor, as the Lord God of Hosts declares that "I will come near to you to judgment; and I will be a swift witness...against those that oppress the hireling in his wages" (Malachi 3:5).  If you cite "Sodomy" as the greatest threat to our civilization, I rush to agree with you, for "Sodomy" in the Bible means only this: "Behold, this was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom, pride, fulness of bread...neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy" (Ezekial 16:49).  And we all know what happened to Sodom.