In the Middle: In Memoriam: Lee Patterson

In the Middle: In Memoriam: Lee Patterson

I'm so sorry to hear this.  We had our differences, but had been in friendlier touch recently, and I know he was doing so many things he loved to do, still teaching, always busy.  How quick bright things come to confusion.

Inefficiency in Hard Times

Here's a link some of you might want to visit:
http://richde.wordpress.com/2011/05/18/if-you-have-to-ask-ten-sure-fire-ways-to-lose-money-on-research/
I was having dinner not long ago with one of my New Center for Psychoanalysis classmates, his wife (who teaches Spanish at a Cal State) and their good friend (who is a lab administrator at UCLA).  I remarked in the course of some conversation about academic finances that had never been any solid evidence behind the claim that scientific research was profitmaking for universities (as opposed to their corporate "partners").  Cross-subsidies and recharge practices have always been too opaque were to justify that claim.  Those who study university budgeteering know that scientific research costs universities a lot of money, and that granting insitutions are supposed to reimburse those costs on the basis of "recharge" applications.  It's common, however, that the recharge monies actually covered by the University fall below the target.   Oh, no, they said.  Every flick of a light switch is accounted for in those grant applications.  Yes, yes, I said.  The grant application is just the beginning of the process.  What you say is "common knowledge," but it's really just a convenient supposition.  They had a hard time opening their minds on the subject.  Let's say, in the USA, it's a doxa, not just a supposition.
CA is going through its usual budget throes and UC continues to conduct its hideous experiments on "in/efficiency." These utterly non-innovative experiments mostly consist of firing staff who either interface directly with faculty and students, or care for the infrastructure.  Student Affairs loyalists also complain that their budgets are always the first to go, and I sympathize with that point of view, insofar as we are talking about counseling and health services, and funds to help students participate in school culture, e.g. by bringing important speakers of their choice to campus--a "right" to which Yudof and the right-wing "pro-Israel"anti-multicultural academic lobby are opposed.  (I believe there must be an Israel, btw.)  But I have to admit that I think a lot of student services are not as important as the opportunity to study Korean should you happen to live on the Pacific Rim.  Also, I could do without Grad Division.  I really think the faculty and graduate students are the people who know which graduate research most deserves funding, not persons in the field of "educational management." 
Is there any good news?  Any hobbits about?  Messianic saviors of mindfulness?  At first I was excited about Jerry Brown's budget veto, because I foolishly hoped his motives included disapproval of the enormous cuts to UC required by the proposal.  Those better-informed than I report otherwise.  My friend Bob Samuels ("Changing Universities") finds everything budgetary still thoroughly lamentable.  Probably--a long history thereof would suggest--the levels required by the proposed cuts will be taken next time as the new normal and justify even worse pillagings.  Tra la.  My latest mad hope is that Brown is not so much endorsing Republican propaganda about taxes and big government as he is refusing to adopt the Republican/Obama strategy of papering over the country's impecuniousness by going into more debt so you can just cut the programs you don't like, but don't have to bust any trusts or cut back on robot weaponry programs (the Armed Services are, like the Academy, still somewhat labor-intensive).  I think Brown means to imply this when he talks about "adult" budgets.  The difficulty is that all human beings live in fantasy worlds that make better or worse use of more or less, these or those, kinds of realities.  Our experience as world-simulators should have taught us by now that taking away our allowance is not always an effective counter-strategy.  Granted, that kind of thing can cut deeply into treasured beliefs as well as "practical" services.  Lots of folk console themselves by taking the position that disability payments just can't be cut any further or student fees raised higher. And we're easy to manipulate because we're always prone to believe that "other people" are getting away with murder--me included. Maybe if the county refuses to partner(contribute lots of money to) infrastructure projects benefiting private or non-profit users, someone would eventually "get" it.  More likely, however, those private and non-profit users will attack the county for its anti-capitalism (as opposed to its refusal to use taxpayer money for private interests--our current form of taxation without representation).  Sigh.  We can't be made acquainted with reality simply by taking our pocket money away.

Gen Ed

Interdisciplinarity:  if it isn't a way of downsizing departments into one unit, where's the commitment?  Something of a rhetorical question, I know.  But it's still very difficult at my own university to get team-teaching, or teaching in other units, approved.  Last week it was announced that it's going to be even harder and probably impossible to give faculty release time to teach in other units.  If that isn't cutting into the educational mission of the university, I don't know what is.  I love to teach in something called the College of Creative Studies, which has (surprise?) a great nationwide reputation in the sciences, and whose literature students are amazing--so smart and thoughtful and motivated.  Now it appears I may not be able to do so again after this year, when I will be teaching the first run of a course on the history of interdisciplinary thinking about the mind.  I'll be teaching it again as a regular English course for Lit and Mind--but there's something very special about working the course out with a (relatively) small group of lively student minds who can think "meta" with ease.  There have already been a few administrative attempts here to address the Senate on the topic of requirements that keep students from finishing quickly.  My cynical soul, however, tells me that's a ruse; the scientists don't like Gen Ed and neither does the technocracy, and one of the main reasons students have trouble finishing in 4 years is that they don't hire enough faculty to teach the courses students need to graduate.  I have desperate students from other majors in wholly elective classes, who just need a class, any class.  Getting rid of requirements is just another way of getting rid of (humanist) faculty; nobody seems to be asking the science departments to streamline the extremely tight series of requirements they design for their own majors.  I love the idea of students taking interdisciplinary courses that are also about interdisciplinarity and hence forms of knowledge.  It may well be the only way to show students not already committed to liberal arts why it matters for them to be able to look at things from multiple perspectives.  It's all about plasticity.

Hard Times III

@Sparky:  I so agree.  But a life without cocktails?  Maybe if I started pruning out useless administrators, I could have fewer meetings, and more time for Widowmakers.

Hard Times II

So, out of the frying-pan into the fryer.  At this point, I'll be lucky to retire with a pension, and I fear for my junior colleagues.  It's such a weird experience to hear people opining about all our ill-gotten privileges.  No one becomes an academic to get rich.  In return for accepting token salaries, we expect--or expected--good benefits.  Even those token salaries have fallen 40% behind national averages in the last decade.  Now the neo-liberal technocrats want to get rid of tenure and academic freedom, hire yet more part-time instructors, start online ed (despite the huge initial investment and  terrible completion rates) and set the curriculum (v. CUNY's admin's recent attempt to take over the faculty's right to design courses of study, and Idaho's ongoing suspension of the rights of its faculty government).  Student fees are skyrocketing.  These policies will wreck the public access to liberal arts education that once made us the most creative economy in the world.  So why are we letting this happen?  It's crazy.  It's like Esau and the pottage.  

Hard Times I

I am in Hanover, NH, having travelled here to attend a conference, and having very mixed feelings about it.  I used to teach at Dartmouth College, during the '80s, the second bad period for public education in the late 20th century.  (The first was the '70's; graduating cohorts were then known as the "lost generation" because it was so difficult to find a post as a professor.)  I was one fortunate graduate, and drove (tentatively--all those trees scared me) to Dartmouth, in the firm hope that the recession was ending, and things would more or less return to normal:  the postwar days, when professors made as much money as doctors, attorneys and other professionals, and were widely respected.  It was not to be.  The right wing launched its first assault on higher education in the 1980's, with special emphasis, at the time, on the Ivies, and first and foremost, Dartmouth College.  The Olin Foundation and other right-wing donors funded a newspaper called The Dartmouth Review.  It had no official relationship to Dartmouth College, but of course benefited from the brand; and whenever its unofficial faculty adviser was called to account for the paper's actions, he denied all responsibility.  Nobody thought to track his use of Dartmouth College “blitzmail” (email).  He was one of my English Department colleagues; he had access to our personnel files and participated in our personnel decisions.  He even divorced his wife and married the department secretary, such was his devotion to our doings.  He advocated the William F. Buckley kind of right-wing politics: economically “conservative,” contemptuous, socially and culturally elitist, and angry that their Ivies were letting in women and "people of color.”  After the Dartmouth Review was founded, there followed a long stream of hysterical attacks, especially on faculty who taught literature written by women, or indeed anything else that seemed unpleasantly alien to the old Ivy world and its new supporters.  The faculty reacted by doing nothing, arguing that it was beneath us to stoop to the level on which the Dartmouth Review had been squatting.  As a consequence, it got worse and worse.  After ten years of horrible departmental and decanal politics I left to become an Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where Jerry Brown is currently enabling the hijacking of the (formerly) finest public university in the world .