ALL POLITICS ARE LOCAL

I have been busy working up my next Plato lecture [more on that a bit later], but today is Primary Day in North Carolina, so Susie and I just voted.  On the ballot?  Candidates for the Democratic Party nominations for Sheriff of Chatham County, Clerk of Court of Chatham County, and U. S. Representative from the 6th CD of NC.  Now, I will be honest.  Sheriff and Clerk of Court are not at the very top of my political to-do list, but if we are to take over the country, Chatham County is as good place as any to start.  Ryan Watts is a very nice twenty-something young man trying to unseat Mark Walker, one of the most right-wing Reps in the Republican Party.  Walker has a usually safe seat, but all things are possible this year, so I have volunteered for campaign and will do my bit.

Stay tuned.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY

Today is the bicentennial of the birth of Karl Marx.  His hauptwerk remains the most penetrating and powerful critique of capitalism ever written.  I have had my say about him in two books, half a dozen articles, and seven videotaped lectures, so I shall content myself with lighting a birthday candle in his honor.  In June, when I am in Paris, I shall travel up to Brussels to give a lecture in his honor.  No one in the United States has asked me to do that.

DARK THOUGHTS

One of the oddly comforting implications of Marx’s scathing critique of capitalism is that those exploiting and oppressing the workers are actually a very small, albeit rich and powerful, fraction of the population, which carries with it the hope that if they could be overthrown, the great majority of men and women could go on to create a just society.  As I live day by day through the present disaster, which increasingly feels like the end days, the most disheartening single fact about America is that not very much less than half of the adult population supports Donald Trump and his presidency.  I am absolutely committed to doing what I can to elect progressives in the midterm elections, to try desperately to do something, anything, for all those who, unlike myself, are personally hurt by the government’s policies and actions.  But even if we score an enormous victory in November, it will remain the fact that almost half the country supports Trump.

Now, it is easy to recount all those evils of America that that are as much the fault of the Democrats as of the Republicans, that are in fact rooted in the very structure of our society and economy.  I have been doing that all my life.  But since there will never be a revolution, if electoral politics is after all a waste of time, a mug’s game, then I am condemned to live what remains of my life as an internal outcast, a stranger in a strange land, to quote Genesis.

I cannot bear that, I cannot accept it, I cannot break faith with those I have called comrades in what feels like a self-indulgent fit of pique, but it is hard, it is hard.

AN HYPOTHESIS

OK, here is a little experiment.  First, I Google “CPI Deflator” [or Consumer Price Index Deflator] and get taken to an app that allows me calculate how much x dollars in y year is in dollars of z year.  Got that?  Then I go online and look for current Harvard tuition, which is $46,340 a year [much less than Columbia, mysteriously.]

Now, I recall that when I went to Harvard as a Freshman in 1950, tuition was $600.  My CPI Deflator tells me that this is $6,136 in 2018 dollars.  So Harvard today, in constant dollars, costs between seven and eight times as much as it did in 1950.

Why is this?  One possible answer is that Harvard offers an education today that is many times as good as the education it offered then.  Trust me, that is not the correct explanation.  I mean, Plato is Plato, Tolstoy is Tolstoy, Weber is Weber, and I couldn’t study Marx’s economics at Harvard then but I can’t get now either.  A second possible answer is that the salary of the professors has soared, but alas, that is also not true.  When I started at Harvard as an Instructor in 1958, after getting my doctorate and doing six months on active duty as part of my military service, I was paid $6,500.  That would be roughly $56,000 in 2018 dollars, and although young Instructors at Harvard [if there are any nowadays] will make more than that, they won’t make seven times as much, which would be almost $400,000.

So what’s up?

Herewith, an hypothesis.  It was the Viet Nam War.  The war was a disaster for the powers that be in American society.  It damned near ruined the Army, which was torn apart by fragging and drugs and a loss of command and control.  And it tore up the campuses, disrupting the hitherto smooth processing of the elite young into the upper reaches of the pyramidal structure of jobs and salaries that defined then, and defines now, American society.

The response?  The military went to an all-volunteer army, with better pay, career opportunities, and no draft.  And the Academy responded by saddling students with a load of debt that virtually compelled the college fragment of the age cohort to move docilely, obediently into high paid jobs in the corporate and professional worlds.  It is not for nothing that 30% of Columbia’s graduating class goes into investment banking.

When I was young, it was literally possible, with great effort, to work one’s way through college.  Not now.

Just an hypothesis.

OK, SO EXPLAIN ME THIS

Well, I have been outed by Wallerstein as just another entitled snowflake, oblivious of the real conditions of the working class.  Ho hum.

Now, let's continue with his calculations.  The standard course load for Columbia undergraduates is five a semester [ = 15 credits, or a bit more, depending], which is to say ten a year.  Tuition at Columbia is roughly $60,000 a year, which works out to $6000 a course.  My seminar is limited to 20 students, so it brings in $120,000 in tuition [never mind Columbia's 9 billion dollar endowment.]  Let's see, I bring in $120,000 in tuition and I get paid $8,000.  Granted, I get the use of a classroom two hours a week, and a tiny bit of the effort of a department secretary.  In addition, the Chair of the department has promised that I can have a corner of an office to hang my hat in and meet students during the one hour a week Wallerstein has alloted to me.

Somebody is getting rich off my course, and it isn't me.

So why is Columbia's tuition so much?  Ah, that will be for my next post.

SHOULD TEACHING ASSISTANTS UNIONIZE?

In the story to which Jerry Fresia links, there is a reference to the week-long strike by unionized graduate student instructors at Columbia that has just wrapped up.  Columbia is fighting the unionization tooth and nail – surprise, surprise – and this stance is, I am sure, supported by a number of otherwise impeccably liberal faculty members who profess to believe that unionization will injure, if not destroy, the special relationship of mentor to disciple that makes teaching at a graduate university so delicious.  If I may borrow a technical philosophical term that my old friend Harry Frankfort introduced into philosophy in a book of the same name, bullshit.

I have two arguments against this widespread view, one short, the other long.  Seeing as how I am a Philosopher, I will give both.

Short first.  I realize it is somewhat inappropriate to cite facts in a high-toned argument about matters of principle in the Academy, but I actually have some experience in this matter which is relevant.  I taught for fifty years.  For the first thirteen years, I taught in the elite private sector of higher education – Harvard, Chicago, Columbia – where the very thought of a graduate student union would have produced fainting and a clutching of pearls.  I then taught for thirty-seven years at the University of Massachusetts, a big second tier perpetually underfunded state university where, after I had been there several years, first the faculty and then the graduate students unionized.  At all four of those institutions, the graduate students were appropriately and very satisfyingly submissive, adoring, obedient, and eager to become as much like those of us on the faculty as they could.  I observed no difference in these respects between UMass and the Ivies.  The fears of the Columbia faculty are groundless.  The Administration is another matter.  They just don’t want to have to pay any more than they must to the poor sots who actually deliver the education for which students cough up about as much, in four years, as a new Rolls Royce costs.  As I think I have reported in this place before, Columbia is paying me $8,000 to teach a course there in the Fall, which is, among other things, 80% of what UNC has paid me lately for the same services.  Whatever my personal foibles and failings, no one can accuse me of doing it for the money.

Now long.  Universities originated as guilds, which is to say private associations of artisans who both practiced and policed the practicing of their craft.  Each Master of the craft maintained a workshop in which the skills and knowledge of the craft were passed on to young apprentices and journeymen.  A boy might be apprenticed to a Master as a teenager or younger, after which he would live in the shop, work as a servant, learn the craft slowly from older apprentices and from the Master himself, and eventually become an accomplished practitioner – a goldsmith, coppersmith, joiner, pottery maker – or teacher.  The Masters of the guild collectively managed the craft, deciding who could practice it, where they could practice it, and even what prices they could charge for their wares.

From time to time, a journeyman artisan would seek the approval of the guild to become a Master, desiring to set up his own shop with his own apprentices and journeymen.  As part of the process of getting the approval of the guild for this plan, he would be required to produce an especially fine and technically demanding piece of work demonstrating that he had the required skills to be recognized as a Master – a Masterwork, in short.  The Doctoral Dissertation with which we are now familiar was originally just such a work, produced by a journeyman and evaluated by a committee of masters. 

The relationship between Master and journeyman was and was understood to be reciprocal, although not of course one of equals.  The journeyman owed obedience and loyalty to the Master, and through him to the Guild, but the Master in his turn owed to the journeyman tutelage, guidance, and material support.

The job crisis at the university level in the Humanities and also in some branches of the Social Sciences has made it difficult, indeed on occasion impossible, for newly minted PhDs to find tenure track jobs [if I may descend to the jargon of the moment.]  Many departments around the country have responded by reducing the numbers they admit to doctoral programs, seeking conscientiously not to accept more applicants than they can reasonably hope to place.  Other schools [and Columbia, I believe, is one] have not been so carefully self-denying.  Columbia, in particular, has actually solved two problems at once by creating what it calls Preceptorships, two or three year terminal post-doctoral teaching positions in the College.  A word of explanation is called for.

The jewel in the crown of Columbia’s undergraduate program is a ninety-nine year old course called Contemporary Civilization, or CC, which, somewhat paradoxically, is an intense year-long romp through the Great Books of Western Civilization that touches on just about everything except contemporary literature.  Over the past century, CC has metastasized into a set of General Education requirements that eats up a sizable portion of every student’s first two years.  Now, part of the deep educational commitment of Columbia is the teaching of these materials in small discussion sections of 22 students or so, and since every undergraduate must take them, Columbia mounts 62 sections of CC every semester.

This is an enormous pedagogical commitment, requiring large numbers of instructors.  The original idea, of course, was for senior faculty to devote endless hours to teaching the Great Books to freshmen [and, latterly, freshwomen], but it will come as no surprise, I am sure, that it has become more and more difficult to persuade faculty to engage in this great pedagogical enterprise.  Advanced graduate students can pick up some of the slack, but even that is insufficient.  The solution:  offer to the new PhDs who cannot get real teaching jobs a two or three year stint as grunts covering the CC classes the faculty do not want to teach.  You can pay them a pittance, since they are now unfit for any other sort of work and still long to get on a tenure track somewhere.  What is more, when the three year contract runs out, the senior faculty can say, righteously, “You are on your own.  We gave you your first post-doctoral teaching job, and besides we have a new crop of PhDs who need out attention.”

Thus, the thousand year old implicit contract between the Masters and Journeymen of the Academy has been broken.  The university has ceased to be a guild and has become a modern corporation.  The undergraduates are now the customers, the graduate students are the labor force, the senior faculty are middle management, and the Administration is the senior management and board of directors.

Under these circumstances, unionization makes perfectly good sense.

TODAY'S TASKS

Jerry Fresia’s delightful comment on my post about clothing choices has prompted me to write two blog posts, one about graduate student unionization, the other about what the sociologist Robert Merton would have called the manifest and latent meaning of the high cost of college these days.  This may take a while, so bear with me.  Meanwhile, here is part of Jerry’s comment: 

“Given your recent clothing choices, along with your new teaching gigs, I thought you might enjoy this article: Columbia 1968, Columbia 2018: the Rebels of the Past Meet the Rebels of Today by JONAH RASKIN.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/04/30/columbia-1968-columbia-2018-the-rebels-of-the-past-meet-the-rebels-of-today/”