Speaking of slow death by acceptance of declining expectations…
This has been going on for a long time. It’s been going on during Obama’s administration. But we just go along with it until, suddenly, a large group of people discover they’re living under intolerable conditions, and everything snaps.
Snapping doesn’t seem to change anything though, except to leave another sad pile of humans in the gutters the rich can safely ignore forever. I guess it’s less a snapping, which involves a reactive movement, than it is breaking, which is where we all just fall down, utterly unable to get up.
Even the ivy league is gonna be brain drained by this situation ultimately, if they haven’t already. I can see it now – the only professors left are expected to rubber stamp the degrees of a bunch of quadrillionaire white boys who just showed up for one day of finger painting and spent the rest of their time drinking, raping, and learning racist chants.
I should go to sleep. It’s 4:18 AM here.
Now that the schools are paying their presidents millions of dollars, the money’s gotta come from somewhere.
Businesspeople and capitalists: as soon as you let ’em in the door they start to eat everyone slower than them, and grab whatever’s not nailed down. It’s in their nature.
Marcus Ranum is pretty spot-on about where the money is going. Obviously, me opining to PZ about academics is like a voter trying to teach Debbie Wasserman Schultz how to commit ethics violations, but it was definitely in full swing by the late 1990s. I think the zeitgeist of the late 1970s and early 1980s really brought it about — much though I am down on the Clintons, they aren’t to blame for everything. Somewhere around then there was even a Doonesbury strip suggesting that academics were too immune from “market forces”. (It was about a Classical Greek professor threatening to leave the college for private industry if his stipend wasn’t raised, laughably confident that he would be “snapped up in a minute”.)
I was once hired for two classes, well really the same class I two different campuses. There credit class in nutrition. One was 40 minutes away once a week for 3 hours, one was 60 minutes away and 4 to 5 times a week for 45 minutes at 1230 pm. Right in the middle of the day. I wanted the experience, and to maintain relations with the school. I signed the contracts. 19 dollars a credit hour. A couple of days before the semester started, They cancelled the once a week class. I ended up teaching one class that semester. I drove an hour each way to work for 45 minutes four times a week. And got paid just enough to buy the has. Took one more class with them the next semester teaching microbiology and lab. They were really limited in in-person science classes . Just the ones needed to support the nursing program. After that I worked in the meat department of a grocery store till we moved. Yeah.
Anyway, I’ve given up.
Yeesh. Missed a lot of edits on that one. I plead phone typing and apathy.
Sadly, I’m afraid that the republican experiment in privatization of public education and the victimization of educators will be spread nation-wide now. I hope that the blue states stand strong against those policies.
I think that part of why this election went so wrong is the triumph of the decades of “dumbing down” of Americans.
Educators and the well-educated have been victimized and branded as “elitists” until many people now have contempt for the very educators who could help them to better their own lives through education.
The republicans created a voting block that is willfully and proudly ignorant.
Education may be our most potent tool against them. How can we make a good education for all accepted again?
1) Random jabs at DWS and the Clintons that have nothing to do with the topic at hand.
2) Acknowledgment that you don’t have sufficient knowledge to respond by opining on the subject.
3) Opining away anyway with a vapid reference to a zeitgeist.
My only hope is that you’ll eventually become as tired of grinding your petty axe as many others have long been of reading or having to skim past your comments, and try to offer more constructive suggestions on subjects about which you’re more informed. Seriously, if you felt compelled to try to connect DWS and the Clintons to this subject in a completely non-substantive way, you should engage in a little introspection about what’s really motivating you to comment and whether your remarks are contributing to positive goals.
I think, much as the media culture has changed in pursuit of ratings and advertising dollars, the academic culture will change under the “guidance” of experienced, serious, important MBAs who know better than a bunch of “perfessers” how to go about running a tight ship and trimming the fat and “right-sizing” all of these colleges until only the most profitable subjects remain.
As GOD intended it.
To answer the question, it was when Reagan, Thatcher, et al introduced unbridled competition.
I shouldn’t, perhaps, have said unbridled. There was one profession excused from unbridled competition – Funeral Directors. (At least, that was the case in the UK.) I can imagine when the Government’s Office of Fair Trading told their trade association to engage in free competition, they just threatened to let the bodies pile up. So they got a dispensation.
@#7, SC (Salty Current)
People like DWS deserve no mercy whatsoever from anyone. Even if you’re a Clinton supporter who believes that Sanders could not possibly have won the primaries without the DNC’s thumb on the scales, the revelations that the DNC was fixing the primaries hit Clinton in the polls, hard, and gave resonance to Trump’s charges that Clinton was corrupt and the election would be fixed. Everyone should be mad at her and her cohort. If all that happens to her is that she becomes the butt of jokes and jabs like this online, that’s far, far less than she deserves. (And that’s before you consider that in her capacity as Congress member she has been working to sabotage Elizabeth Warren’s attempts to reign in the banks.)
So regardless of your point, your defense is of someone who does not deserve a defense at all.
So what? PZ himself has engaged in opining on topics he doesn’t know much about before. When he strays from the ethical side of them, he often gets stuff wrong. It doesn’t mean he’s not worth reading. The same goes for many commentators and commenters, not just here but elsewhere. If I had left out the disclaimer, would the rest of the comment have been any better or worse than otherwise? Of course not.
(You also let your outrage make you miss the point: my point was that even if the action happened in the 1990s, it was still a result of the pressures of at least a decade earlier.)
Hmmmm. You know, this looks exactly like sour grapes from an embarrassed Clinton supporter who is hoping everyone will just shut up about how terrible and mismanaged the whole campaign was, and how their candidate was an incompetent hack right from the start. So I’ll treat it as such.
Meanwhile, you get to enjoy the fact that I responded to your comment by expanding on the subject, which means your comment was self-defeating and pointless. Congratulations! Maybe if you want this topic to go away as fast as possible, you should learn to be less touchy about it.
I enjoyed Professor X’s book on the subject: https://www.amazon.ca/Basement-Ivory-Tower-Truth-College/dp/B00CF5HQDM/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1478822246&sr=8-1&keywords=basement+of+the+ivory+tower
He described an artificial demand -wait staff now need degrees – forcing an artificial supply ; the adjunct professors.
To some extent, this reminds me of the fitness restrictions that kept women out of some jobs, for example, fire fighting. Most women could not complete the strength requirements in the application period, but those feats of strength were not required in the job itself.
Mercy isn’t relevance.
There is no logical or empirical or any other coherent connection between the two items. Only in your own mind did you think there was some reason to bring up Clinton or Schultz here, but in fact there is no serious reason to do so.
It wasn’t a defense of them or even an attempt to defend them. SC was saying your introduction of them into this thread makes no fucking sense. They are irrelevant. The KKK is also irrelevant here, and if you objected to me bringing them up in this thread, I shouldn’t conclude that the objection comes in the form of a defense of the KKK. I’d conclude that you’re right, because in fact the KKK has fuck all to do with this topic.
Therefore it’s good to be an ignorant opinion-generator. Nope, doesn’t follow. I didn’t have the premise that we should do everything PZ does. If that were true it would follow, but it isn’t so it doesn’t. You see how this works?
In general, for many other topics except that one? No, of course not. On that topic? Yes, it does.
Were you offering your general views about all sorts of topics other than this one? Why would you be doing that? And how are we supposed to believe that’s relevant here, when your comment clearly was not offering views about evolutionary biology, atheism, or whatever else it may be other than the actual topic which was under discussion?
Is this a post-election cranky pharyngulite metadebate on what’s relevant to the OP or just an ordinary metadebate on what’s relevant to the OP?
The US adjunct prof. system sounds terrible. We have table-based university prof wages as well as standard worker protection laws here…
Nice Derail there Vicar. extra points for making it about someone you don’t like.
Great American Satan claimed that even the Ivy League will ultimately be affected by this situation. I could hardly disagree more. Ivy League faculty jobs are still well-paid and overwhelmingly tenure-track, as are many of the faculty jobs at top public universities. It’s the lower tiers of universities (and their teachers, who educate most Americans) who are getting screwed, together with a teaching underclass that also exists at some of the good state schools. We’re adopting a two-tiered system of university faculty, with a privileged elite to do the glamorous research and a large group bouncing from one adjunct position to another. Just as in so many other professions, the middle has been hollowed out.