SPECULATIONS

What follows, let me emphasize, are speculations, not predictions.  All of these speculations are optimistic.  At a time when thousands are dying and perhaps hundreds of thousands will follow them to the grave [or to the freezer truck], it is no effort to forecast the worst.  Consider these not even speculations, but rather a call to action. 

In most great natural calamities, some species of animals and plants perish.  One thinks of the Permian-Triassic Extinction, in which 70% of terrestrial vertebrate species disappeared.  The COVID event is not in that league, but it may claim one hardy species of faux raptor, the Great Republican Deficit Hawk.  After the fourth, fifth, and sixth multi-trillion dollar “stimulus” packages are passed unanimously by the Senate and signed into law, the once-feared deficit hawk may have retreated to a protected sanctuary in the Cato Institute, only to reappear on ritual occasions to preen, fluff its feathers, and utter its distinctive “cuuuut, cuuuut” cry.

As the Deficit Hawk dies out, small timid MMT theorists may emerge from their safe havens in second tier university Economics Departments and, as often happens during such upheavals, evolve into fearsome saber toothed Ivy League professors.  The genera, sub-genera, families, species, and sub-species of Marxists, who have survived by identifying and cultivating less hostile backwaters in State universities, will in all likelihood not benefit from the COVID extinction.  Since they prey mostly on one another they are ill-suited to take advantage of openings in the intellectual ecosystem.

Which brings me to health care, or, as the virus is revealing, the lack of health care.  If I may continue the evolutionary metaphor, the development of the American health care unsystem is a classic example of the speciation that Darwin discovered on his famous sea voyage.  Separated from the rest of the world by two large oceans, America has developed a completely distinctive, utterly inefficient, but on the other hand exorbitantly expensive way of caring for its citizens’ health care needs.  The struggle to rectify this disaster has consumed the energies of Democrats for a large part of the seventy years.  Improvements have been achieved, to be sure, by means of a mode of evolution that the late evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Goud called Punctuated Equilibrium.  That is to say, long periods of stasis interrupted by brief bursts of change.  It looks to me as though we may emerge from the COVID extinction with an overwhelming consensus in support of rapid fundamental change.  Joe Biden, who is probably ideally situated to benefit politically from what will come to be called the Trump Die Off, is perhaps the worst Democrat in America to lead such a period of change, but as he seems not to have any identifiable convictions, he can be counted on to sign whatever a Democratic Congress puts before him.

I shall now put behind me the biological metaphor, which has outlived its usefulness.  Quite the most interesting political development of the past month is the shift taking place before our eyes in the relative power, status, and energy of the federal government and the state governments.  In the past 90 years, the powers of the presidency have been so enlarged and those of state governors so diminished that it would have been a brave prognosticator who would have suggested as recently as February that the Office of the Presidency would be reduced to a clown car sideshow while a governor would become the voice of the people and the hope of the nation.  Only a President as uniquely ungifted as Trump could have accomplished such a reversal.  Whether it will in any form survive the present crisis is difficult to say.  Surely it is unlikely, but perhaps it is not impossible.

Finally, what does this all mean for the election?  In closing, I will make an actual prediction.  Things will look worse and worse for Trump in April, May, June, and even early July.  By deep summer, the virus will have receded, people will be going back to work, Trump will claim victory, and those of us on the left will despair.  Then, as fall follows summer and the election looms, the virus will return, just in time to crush Trump’s chances for reelection. 

A BRIEF INTERLUDE

After yet another night troubled by dreams of COVID-19, I will later today take a crack at forecasting the large changes I foresee as possible outcomes of the virus, but first, I should like to share with you a lovely moment from last evening.  It may lift your spirits.  A word of background explanation is necessary.

I have a stuffed bear, who sleeps with me and even on one occasion accompanied me to New York for my Columbia class.  He is a pretty standard Winnie the Pooh bear, complete with little red coat.  His name is Howard.  Howard is named after a famous movie star, Jonah’s bear in the almost forty year old romantic comedy Sleepless in Seattle, starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan.  The movie is, among other things, a cinematic homage to the great old Cary Grant Deborah Kerr tearjerker An Affair to Remember.  It ends, appropriately, on the Observation Deck of the Empire State Building, where Jonah has gone in hopes of finding Meg Ryan.  After he leaves, Ryan finds Jonah’s forgotten backpack with his bear in it, and in the romantic conclusion to the movie, she returns it and asks Jonah the bear’s name.  “This is Howard,” he says, and the three go off together to what the Director, Nora Ephron, makes clear will be a happily ever after.

Yesterday evening, having watched as much news commentary as I could stomach, I lay in bed surfing the web, looking for anything to distract me.  Somewhere in the clutch of movie channels provided by my Spectrum subscription, I stumbled on the last 40 minutes of Sleepless in Seattle.  I watched it happily with Howard perched on my chest.  Howard was overjoyed, or at least as overjoyed as a stuffed bear can be.

RUMBLINGS

More and more strongly I am coming to suspect that America will emerge from this medical crisis changed in significant ways.  Perhaps better, perhaps worse, but changed.  Changed economically, changed politically, changed socially.  I was born in the fourth year of the Great Depression and grew up as a boy during the Second World War.  Those two events changed America fundamentally.  I do not yet have anything like a coherent analysis or set of expectations, simply a suspicion.  This is different, different from the Oil Shock, different from the Great Recession, different even from the Viet Nam War.

PRIVACY

Several of the comments on this blog have made it clear that I really, really rub some people the wrong way.  I must say I am rather reassured by that.  As a young man, I was, shall we say, a trifle provocative at times, and though I know I have mellowed, I am pleased to discover that I still have the ability to drive some people nuts, even as I am smiling and seeming to be just a regular nice guy.

Let me say a few words about an issue raised in the minds of several commentators by my naïve enthusiasm for zoom.  Some people have what strikes me as an odd ambivalence about the privacy of their communications.  On the one hand, they think nothing of communicating with one another by the use of their cellphones, which are essentially spiffy modern versions of the shortwave radios used by ham radio enthusiasts a century ago.  On the other hand, they are shocked, shocked [if I may steal a phrase from Casablanca] to learn that the world is listening in.  If you want privacy, or something pretty close to it, try snail mail, for heaven’s sake.   When you communicate with the functional equivalent of a megaphone, it is a bit odd to get upset that folks can hear you.

For most of the two hundred thousand years or so of the human race, people had no more privacy than a pride of lions or a gaggle of geese.  For almost all of recorded history, which is to say for the last six thousand years, give or take, most people lived in villages or nomadic tribes small enough so that everyone knew everyone, and knew everyone’s business besides.  In such a setting, you knew who was being born and who was dying, who was courting, who was planting, who was tending sheep, who was shooing horses, who was good with a sword, who could play the lute, and who baked really good pies.  You also knew as soon as a stranger came to town.  One of the distinctively unusual features of the eighteenth and nineteenth century frontier in America was the possibility of starting afresh, taking a new name, leaving old connections behind.

The big anonymous cities that we all now take for granted were anomalies, but today they are the norm.  During the seven years that I taught at Columbia, I lived at 415 W. 115^th street, apartment 51.  There were 24 apartments in the building, and in those seven years I only met the occupant of one other apartment – Bob Belknap, who lived in apartment 52 and taught Russian Lit at Columbia.  One day I tried to explain to him my excitement about Kenneth Arrow’s General Possibility Theorem, which showed that there was no majority-rule type decision procedure that avoided possible contradictions.   He looked at me uncomprehendingly and said, “But life is full of contradictions.”  I guess reading too much Dostoyevsky will do that to you.

THERE IS SOMETHING GOOD ABOUT ZOOM

Next Thursday I shall spend an hour visiting a class on the Critique being taught by a professor at the University of Wyoming.  Not bad.

WHO KNEW?

I do a little armchair speculating and in comes not a breath but a hurricane of fresh air from the real world.  I received this today from a reader of this blog.  It is self-explanatory.  I feel like an MSNBC commentator on the pandemic who just interviewed Dr. Fauci.  I think the revolution is going to take a bit longer than I had hoped.

                                                                       Guest Post

Back in 2015—a few years after Prof. Wolff commented on a chapter of my dissertation thanks to a comment I left on this very blog—I got a job as a program director for a group of credit-bearing programs in the continuing education division of a large public university. (Mine was a smallish unit in a very large continuing education division.) My role was to plan and staff around 200 open-enrollment courses per year, taught by ~120 adjunct instructors, across the humanities and social sciences. My unit had around 4,000 enrollments per year. The divison's mandate is to be self-supporting: it receives no state funding for any of its offerings (and reimburses the main university for any expenses used, e.g. classroom space).

I'm going to keep names out of this post so that google results don't come back to haunt me in some way down the line, but all the numbers below are actual numbers, from a 2017 planning spreadsheet.

I went from the armchair to monitoring enrollments, managing budgets, and making really, really painful decisions to cancel courses due to low enrollment. I left after 3 years, and while I'm happy to have learned a lot from the experience, I'm also happy not to have to cancel people's classes (and income) for low enrollment any more.

We were not the leanest possible higher ed organization that could exist in the actual world, but we were pretty darn lean. Keeping that in mind, you might find it interesting to hear some of the actual numbers that went into making what we called "go/no-go" decisions at the individual section level.

Consider one individual course. Make it a social science course where we can expect better enrollments, which gives us a little more breathing room to pay the instructor more (which we'll have to, if we want to get an economist to expend their valuable labor teaching a continuing ed course).

Predict total enrollment of 15 students. Tuition (in 2017) was $698 for the course. (We really did try to keep our fees low and accessible.) You'll gross $10,740 in tuition.

Let's pay the instructor, say, $3528 for the course. That's on the low end of market value for a quarter-length course, but we'll probably be able to staff the course.

There's your direct expense. Now comes the overhead:

* You'll need to allocate $1,960 for departmental staffing overhead. This pays for the salaries and fringe benefits for myself (the program director) and 1.5 department administrators (one full time, one splitting half their time between this and another program). Those administrators onboard instructors into the payroll system and the online learning management system; answer student inquiries about our courses and do advising on, e.g., where our courses are accepted for transfer credit (which is the reason many students take our courses); and complete many other clerical tasks (which are unevenly distributed among courses and instructors: some instructors are very, shall we say, high maintenance, while others are basically totally independent). That also includes a fraction of the salary for a 'business services' finance person who has a much larger portfolio and processes financial transactions—an accountant, basically (moneybags the continuing education nonprofit administrator must be so lucky!). THE KICKER with these costs: all these people are on payroll regardless, so if enrollments start to decline (as they did when I was there: the decline in humanities enrollments hit us like it did everyone else) and you offer fewer courses, the expense allocated to each individual course goes up rather quickly.

* $3,692 for an "Administrative and Institutional" allocation: this pays for the general institution-wide expenses: electricity, lights, furniture, repainting once in a while, etc. Also the dean's office, HR, the registrar, a student record database system (which is not cheap!) to make sure you can get students accurate transcripts, and many other things. For a time when I was there, the institution was also trying to sock away enough money to pay for our office building to be retrofitted to be seismically sound. Also, in general, as a nonprofit you want to have around 6–12 months of expenses in reserves so that a downturn won't force you to close overnight. All that saving-for-a-rainy-day-and-maybe-not-to-die-in-an-earthquake funding comes out of this bucket.

* A marketing assessment of $1466: this can seem fairly high but is absolutely essential if you're doing course-by-course open enrollment as we did. I don't care how wonderful your course is, if you don't market it, too few people will enroll and you'll have to cancel. This covers creating a course catalog and an institutional website as well as some course-by-course marketing through e-mails, social media ads, etc.

* A classroom assessment of $1,047, which, at the time, weirdly, was socialized across all courses—online or in person. The idea was to remove incentives for program directors to choose online or in-person modalities based on cost, so that we'd be more responsive to what students actually want.

* An ITAV assessment of $209: this pays for that IT guy. Actually, a really good IT department that went above and beyond to support our mission.

* An assessment by the Office of the President (yes, for the whole system) of $127. Sheesh.

Overall, you have $3528 in instructor expenses and $8036 in overhead. That's a little top-heavy because our enrollments were dropping, which meant fewer courses running, which meant the staff costs (the first item in my list) were higher per course. The "Administrative and Institutional" costs were also a little high when I was there; when I heard people talking about the absolute leanest we had ever been, they would cite a number about 20% lower.

Anyway: with 15 students, and all costs allocated, this course "loses" $824. To show that the course is self-supporting, you'd need 2 more students to enroll. I'd probably run the course with 15 students anyway, since a lot of those costs would stay around even if we cancel the course; but to have a healthy unit, it would be good to have higher average enrollments (or, sigh, cut staffing costs).

Now, a caveat: with a large number of part-time adjunct instructors, we needed slightly more staff positions to handle academic planning (me) and making sure that all the clerical items get done (the other staff) than you'd find in a regular university context. I was the only one you could call overpaid; the other admin staff worked their butts off to keep things running.

I'm not trying to defend this way of thinking about higher education. Still, I found it eye-opening to be in a context where I was expected to systematically think about all of our costs, which people had attempted to distribute in a somewhat-reasonable way to specific courses.

WOW, 1,000 words? I guess I had some things to get off my chest…

ARMCHAIR SPECULATION FROM AN ARMCHAIR PROFESSOR

Now that I have taught two sessions of my course using zoom, I quite naturally consider myself an expert on distance education, so I would like to put my newfound mastery of this subject to use by imagining a way in which we could apply it to the solution of two problems that currently bedevil American higher education:  the high cost to students and the miserable pay and working conditions of the hordes of adjuncts who have been substituted for tenure track faculty by cost cutting university administrations.

There is one major problem with the following proposal:  it cannot provide students with laboratory science classes.  I do not now have a solution for that problem.

Consider an on-line undergraduate college offering the full range of Humanities, Social Science, and non-laboratory science courses.  Its faculty consists of retired professors like myself [although not so old, of course] and young men and women with doctorates who have not been able to secure tenure track positions at regular colleges and universities.  The educational credentials and academic accomplishments of its faculty will obtain it accreditation from the appropriate bodies.

This college offers only small distance courses via zoom, by means of which students and faculty can meet regularly and interact as though [more or less] in a classroom.  Each course is limited to 20 students, meets for 14 weeks, and carries 3 academic credits.  A full course load for a student is 5 courses a semester or 10 courses a year, as in most ordinary colleges.

The college has no dorms, no classroom buildings, no fraternities or sororities, no sports teams, no dining halls, no health clinic, no admissions office, no Provost, no Associate Provost, no Deans, no Assistant Deans, and one President, elected by the entire faculty.  Each Department is run collectively by all of the people teaching courses in that discipline.  Young faculty work on five year appointments.  Retired faculty like me teach on one year renewable contracts, in recognition of the fact that they may keel over at any moment or simply lose their marbles.

The college has no endowment and no fixed costs.  Its income is the fees paid by the students and its only cost [save for a little IT] is the salary and benefits of the faculty.  So, what would it cost, and what would the faculty earn?

Google tells me that “the average cost of tuition and fees for the 2019–2020 school year was $41,426 at private colleges, $11,260 for state residents at public colleges and $27,120 for out-of-state students at state schools, according to data reported to U.S. News in an annual survey.”  Let us take the $11,260 as our point of comparison.  I am arbitrarily going to set tuition at our on-line college at $900 a course or $9000 for a full year of five courses per semester or ten courses per year.  That is 80% of the average in-state tuition, a considerable saving.

With 20 students in a course, each course generates $18,000 in income for the college.  How much shall we pay the faculty?  Well, I am being paid $10,000 this semester by UNC Chapel Hill.  Last semester I was paid $15,000 by Columbia, thanks to a special arrangement involving money from the Society of Senior Scholars, of which I am a member, but of course out of that I had to pay the costs of traveling from North Carolina to New York City thirteen times [an expense that is not tax deductible, by the way.]  Let us suppose we pay each professor, whether a retiree like me or a young itinerant adjunct, $13,000.  That is gravy for the likes of me and $78,000 a year for the young adjuncts with a 3-3 teaching load, which is not what they could make as college or university professors but much better than the miserable pay they are getting now.

What about fringe benefits?  The retirees don’t need them.  They have pensions and Medicare.  The extra $5000 a course over and above the Instructor’s salary could easily pay for health insurance and TIAA-CREF pensions for the former adjuncts, with the relatively small administrative costs paid for out of the extra $5000 per retiree-taught course.

There is, of course, a major drawback:  no Senior Prom.