Depression 2.0

[BO]

Let's mark this day as the start of this century's great depression.

The bank bailout bill -- aka 'the septic bank bill -- has failed and the DOW dropped 778 points today. Undoubtably, not the big crash yet to happen. The credit markets are frozen. As Paul Krugman states...the gears on wallstreet are full of sand.

You might not have been affected yet. You will. Let's hear some personal stories on what folks are doing to prepare. Have you stocked the pantry yet? Do you have a contingency plan should you lose your job? Supposedly the run on banks has started. Have you moved your savings out of the bank? What are doing about about your investments--your 401k, pension, etc.

Maybe you'll say, 'I ain't got nothing, so I got nothing to lose'. Truth is, unless you're homeless, with everything you own in the shopping cart you're pushing, well, that ain't exactly true. Maybe the reality of the situation hasn't hit yet. It will soon.

Welcome to the next great depression. So, what's your contingency plan?

[BO]

Couldn't find enough information to make a diagnosis of Arthur Vailas. But...there sure seems to be evidence of increasing fascism in that neck of the woods. Seems ISU is pretty tight with local business and the LDS. Maybe I'm just having an epiphony--not realizing how intertwined universities have become with business and religious organizations. Seems to me that higher learning can't really take place when students are just being indoctrinated into the business world. That the schools would want to stay immune from outside influences. But, like our government, the lines between intellectualism, politics, religion and business have been erased. To hell with the arts--they don't produce profits.

So, now we've university presidents who act like CEO's. Probably not a sociopath. Just an opportunistic business man who's probably pissed that his sports coach makes two and a half times what he does.

Fucked-up ethics produce fucked-up priorities.

[pan]

Ever since I have been in academia the upper-administration types have been repeating the mantra "business model" - which means screw the students, faculty have to write for grants to pay their own salaries and we can be as capricious as possible. But it doesn't mean that their decisions have to be made following sound business practice - never bother with cost/benefit analysis or needs assessment, just do what they think is good.

The Mormons are definitely to be dealt with - they enjoy the power of being 50% of the population. Business.....all universities are in bed. Most research colleges - even the so-called liberal ones - are in bed with the Dept of Defense, busily inventing new ways to kill and maim with more efficiency. And the teacher colleges are busily trying to be research colleges.

If and when your kid goes to college I highly recommend community college because the sole mission is for teachers to teach and then the final two years in a state college. I think Western Washington in Bellingham would be a good one - I have mixed feelings about Evergreen. If he can afford it - a private liberal arts college.

[Mark]

Knowing that your kid is going to need a car and a college degree in order to compete in this country, it is important to make sure you buy them only brand names. Of course as our economy fails, the education industry will go the way of the automobile industry. How long can kids continue to indebt themselves for a decade or more in order to compete for jobs that no longer exist or have been outsourced?

Besides, a college education no longer provides the privileges it used to confer. Nowadays women and minorities are able to attend colleges and are even admitted to fields like law and medicine which used to be called professions before they became industries. A college education no longer ensures the same white male supremacy it did in my day when most students were G.I. Bill and couldn't be flunked. Of course the boards of directors, top faculty, and those with seniority in their fields are still white male G.I. Bill legacies, often totally incompetent, incredibly arrogant, and convinced of their own superiority because they never had to compete.

As a senior citizen I could attend a California state university tuition-free, so some years back I checked the catalog for the nearest one and found that the faculty for the sociology department was completely white male except for one female who was their student contact person, apparently a fancy name for secretary or administrative assistant. By the time the arrogant privileged scum die off, I'll have died off also.

Universities do provide networking contacts and a sense of entitlement, but it sure looks to me that anyone who can attend one already has those things. At any rate, with more and more people competing for fewer and fewer jobs, the advantages of a college education aren't what they used to be.

If you've followed the Ward Churchill case, you know that the right wing has been implementing a plan to purge universities of liberals and unless somebody is as financially secure, intrepid, and broadly supported as Ward, a simple threat from the governor to cut a university's funding unless they fire somebody, is usually quite effective. The judge's decision as to whether to force the university to rehire Ward, who was tenured, or to compensate him in some other way, is expected on July 1st. Although he won his case, most professors couldn't afford such legal costs and would be hard put to simply survive.

I'm reading Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance, and the efforts of females and minorities to bring truth to universities are impressive. But if you look at any college class, you'll see a large number of students and one professor (or more often a T.A.), so how many in that class will be able to compete for that professor's job once it is vacant? The pyramidal structure of competitive hierarchies is not designed to lift all boats, it is designed to preserve an elite ruling class.

The World Institute for World Economics reported back in December 2006, that 1 per cent of the world's adults owned 40 per cent of all global assets and the richest 10 per cent owned 85%; the poorest half owned less than 1 per cent, and the rate at which income disparities have widened since then is explosive. You want to explain to me how a university can prepare students for that global reality? How long will colleges be able to compensate by raising tuitions as capitalism crumbles?

[pan]

In my field - Dance - many programs look to hire females to "balance" the gender imbalance in other programs in the department - so, as a straight white male in dance I am an underrepresented minority in my field, I get discriminated against so other disciplines can continue overrepresenting straight, white males in their fields.

BTW - having had a majority of my bosses who were "Others" I can attest that not being a straight, white male is no guarantee that you are not an oppressive asshole. Essentially - those who rise to tenure, promotion and positions of power are most oftentimes those who have been willing to grease up with plenty of Vaseline and don their kneepads from the time they went after their PhDs through their hiring and promotion. Race, creed, color and gender don't make no difference when it comes to Academic Soul Death.

When my wife went into a doctoral program (she dropped out after realizing that there was no way they would let her do a dissertation based in critical cultural critique of the Post-Human) she bought a giant tub of generic Vaseline and labeled it "PhD" just to remind herself what she was doing there.

[BO]

All your Post Human dissertations are belong to us.

Sad.

[Mark]

Yup. When you've got too much invested in the system to drop out, it can do anything it wants to you. And if the Ward Churchill case ever reaches the Supreme Court, there may no longer be any such thing as tenure by the time you get your Piled Higher and Deeper. If you can retain your sense of humor, you might survive anyway. Even a morbid sense of humor will get you through life better than any academic preparation can. At least that's sort of what Victor Frankl said, and it has also been my personal experience, but then I'm totally lacking in credentials. ;)

[pan]

I agree with Page Smith, the tenure system does exactly the opposite of what its stated intent is: it weeds out "dangerous" young minds that would threaten the institution and, on those rare occasions that someone with contrary notions actually slips through the process (e.g., Ward Churchill) it offers little to no protection.

As Smith suggests, the system should be inverted - automatically give tenure for the first seven years of employment when faculty tend to be full of energy and harbor "dangerous" ideas and then make the old, dead weight have to prove that they are worthy of rehire every two years.

[BO]

Go ahead and rub it in, Mr. Fruit.

But, you haven't lived until you've discovered the joys of pressure-washing the driveway on a Sunday morning. The sweet smell of freshly cut grass--combined with the smell of gas that you spilled all over yourself. And the sense of wonder that comes from changing the filter in your furnace.

One simply hasn't lived until they've experienced the great exaltation that comes from timing a house payment to reach the bank on the exact day before they start adding penalties. Or the relief one feels when they are finally laid-off from their job because they can't pay their bills anyway.

Middle-class stockholm syndrome. It's where you want to be.

[waldopaper]

HAW!! "Middle-class Stockholm syndrome." well- i dont know what class it is... but i got it. Yeah, Stones, it gets worse. The PhD aint penciling out for me. Too much time... too much bread. Are you on a PhD track or an EdD track? I'm up to my eyeballs in EdDs... except where there's a real English Department.

The peanuts I get "paid" would do for me alone under some very austere conditions... but I've done it before. Fortunately, Ms. Waldo keeps us all together with her publik skool seniority. Can't count on anything these days, tho. Hard to tell which way it's gonna break during the collapse.

[pan]

I spent 2 hours installing a new toilet today - the joy when it flushed without leaking was amazing.

[BO]

Congrats, Pan. But wait until you discover that it really wasn't the toilet that was malfunctioning, but your sewer pipe. And your yard starts filling up with all kinds of 'post human discharges' and you get to spend thousands replacing your septic tank.

Something like that actually happened to me. Had a downstairs toilet that overflowed a few times and completely wrecked a nice wood floor I had put in. Seems Qwest had put in a new telephone line via some sub-terraneous 'gopher' device they sent through my yard. The damn thing drilled right through my sewer pipe. About five years later, plants had grown into it and clogged it up. All this time, I thought I had a fucked-up toilet. Didn't discover what the real problem was until some roto-dudes i hired sent a camera down my pipes.

The good news was, I got the pipe fixed and floors replaced on Qwest's dime. Only took me three months of threatening to sue. 'Tis my only victory to date against 'the man.'

[pan]

Got my tax refund from California the other day - not a check but an chit. Gotta see if the Idaho credit union will honor California's IOU.