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.