This is too good to just post a link to on FB or Twitter or even that Tumblr I started with such earnest hopes for the unleashing of my strangely bounded creativity. In a column worthy of the Irish Times’ old contributor, Myles na Gopaleen, Frank McNally lists the History of Ireland in 100 Excuses.

It’s almost impossible to cherry-pick because half of the fun is the cumulative effect, and the other half is they’re so damn funny. Still and all:

1. Original sin.

3. The 800 years of oppression.

9. It was taught badly in schools.

10. The Modh Coinníollach.

25. We only did it for the crack.

72. I must have had a bad pint.

80. The money was only resting in my account.

86. The banks were throwing money at us.

90. The Welsh just seemed to want it a bit more than we did.

As they say, words to live by. My sister Eleanor suggests we use it as the rough draft of our next report to the Troika.

Then in mid-January, Executive Director Rosemary Feal and I decided I should attend the January 28 summit meeting of the New Faculty Majority, whose tweets I had been following on the Twitter machine. (I finally activated my account. Yes, I have a Twitter account. But I’m still not joining Facebook, now more than ever.) Washington, DC is one of the few places I can visit on short notice from my remote mountain lair, and the NFM is a group Rosemary and I want to work with during my presidential year and beyond—trying to get the US higher education apparatus (starting with the American Association of Colleges and Universities) to take seriously, and to ameliorate, the working conditions of non-tenure-track (NTT) faculty. So attending the summit, together with MLA Director of Research David Laurence, made all kinds of sense.

I reported on the summit for Inside Higher Ed, and then posted a longer (though not Holbonian—merely 2500 words) director’s cut on the MLA site. Rosemary and I then Tweeted these things to the Twitterati.

And here’s where things get interesting.

In the longer version of my essay, I had noted that the MLA publishes recommendations for per-course compensation for NTT faculty. This comes as no surprise to me; I remember very well when the Delegate Assembly authorized those recommendations over ten years ago, and when I was a member (and then chair) of the MLA’s Committee on Academic Freedom and Professional Rights and Responsibilities, I helped to update them, as we do each year. Indeed, one year we had a spirited discussion over whether our recommendations were realistic. You’re about to see why.

Apparently, few people—even among the MLA membership—know about these recommendations. So here they are, in relevant part:

Following a review of best practices in various institutions, the MLA recommends minimum compensation for 2011–12 of $6,800 for a standard 3-credit-hour semester course or $4,530 for a standard 3-credit-hour quarter or trimester course. These recommendations are based on a full-time load of 3 courses per semester (6 per year) or 3 courses per quarter or trimester (9 per year); annual full-time equivalent thus falls in a range of $40,770 to $40,800.

University of Georgia writing instructor Josh Boldt, who also attended the NFM summit, responded on his blog “Copy and Paste,” from which I will proceed to copy and paste:

Almost $7K per course! Most adjuncts have never seen anything close to that figure. I personally have taught at schools that pay right at or below $2000 maximum per course. Feel free to do the math on that one (Hint: a 5/5 pays $20,000 annually). You can be a terrible human being and still recognize that a full-time teacher should earn much more than that. Just in case you’re not familiar with the usual procedure, full-time professors generally teach much less than 10 courses per year. Some teach as few as three. The MLA’s recommendation is based on the assumption of a 3/3 teaching load, which sounds about perfect. I would venture to say most adjuncts would agree. Three courses per semester is ideal because it allows teaching to be the primary focus (as it should be), and it also permits some time for research and professional development. So, about $40,000 a year. That isn’t too much to ask I don’t think. Especially considering all adjuncts have advanced degrees in their fields.

It is not too much to ask. We think it’s the bare minimum: it certainly doesn’t constitute making a comfortable living. It merely allows NTT faculty a standard of living a bit higher than the one Boldt references later on in this post, in which college professors “eat Ramen noodles for dinner, and worry about whether or not they have enough gas in the tank to coast to work the rest of the week.”

The problem, of course, is that most NTT positions don’t offer this bare minimum. As I pointed out in the longer version of my NFM report, only 7% of the departments surveyed by the MLA offered per-course wages of $6,800 or more. I didn’t add—but I will now—that the vast majority of surveyed departments offered per-course wages somewhere between $2,500 and $6,800. And a good number of institutions paid less than $2,500.

“Wait a second,” you say. “What do you mean, ‘somewhere between $2,500 and $6,800’? That’s quite a range, isn’t it?” Yes it is. On the high end, up around $5,000 – $6,500, it’s almost like making a decent living. On the low end, it’s basically Ramenland. So we’re working on refining and updating and disaggregating the data, which is one of the many things David Laurence does as Director of Research.

But while we’re doing that, as Tedra has noted below, Boldt went ahead and did something pretty brilliant: he has begun crowdsourcing the data on NTT faculty in a Google doc. He writes:

Let’s combine forces and establish which schools are doing good work, and which are doing bad. Fill in as much information as you feel comfortable doing, and be sure to tweet this document and share it via Facebook, email, listserv, or anywhere else you can think of.

At the summit, we discussed the idea of creating a “Hall of Fame” of the best universities to work for. I would like to see hundreds of schools get added to this list. Eventually, faculty treatment might even become a standard in the accreditation process. This is a good start. If you have current information on the compensation practices for a school, check out the document and add it to the list.

So, what Josh and Tedra said: let’s combine forces. Please spread the word far and wide among the academic blogs, if you haven’t already.

For our part, the MLA will be following Josh’s survey with great interest; we have been working on our own data-gathering model for thousands of institutions, which connects to our work on the Coalition on the Academic Workforce survey project. As I type, we’re gathering current, institution-level data about per-course salaries and selected benefits—which is one of the several data-collection projects carried out by the MLA’s Office of Research and the IT department. (Just for those of you who think the MLA is basically an annual convention, or perhaps a citation style.) I’ll be sure to let everyone know when ours is ready to roll out. In the meantime, thanks to Josh Boldt for taking the initiative on this.

______

** Only one of these improbable things is true.

Back in ancient times when I worked at esteemed weekly newsmagazine U.S. News & World Report, I always loathed the annual college rankings report. Like all cash cows, however, the college guide was a sacred cow, so I just shut up about its obvious statistical absurdities and inherent mendacity. As a lesson in the evils of our times, it is perhaps inevitable that the college guide is now the only thing left of U.S. News.

A story in today’s New York Times reports that Claremont McKenna college has now been caught red handed submitting phony data to the college guide to boost its rankings. But the real scandal, as usual, is not the occasional flagrant instance of outright dishonesty but the routine corruption that is shot through the whole thing. … To increase selectivity (one of the statistics that go into U.S. News’s secret mumbo-jumbo formula to produce an overall ranking), many colleges deliberately encourage applications from students who don’t have a prayer of getting in. To increase average SAT scores, colleges offer huge scholarships to un-needy but high scoring applicants to lure them to attend their institution. (The Times story mentioned that other colleges have been offering payments to admitted students to retake the test to increase the school average.)

… One of my favorite bits of absurdity was what a friend on the faculty at Case Law School told me they were doing a few years ago: because one of the U.S. News data points was the percentage of graduates employed in their field, the law school simply hired any recent graduate who could not get a job at a law firm and put him to work in the library. Their other tactic was pure genius: the law school hired as adjunct professors local alumni who already had lucrative careers (thereby increasing the faculty-student ratio, a key U.S. News statistic used in determining ranking), paid them exorbitant salaries they did not need (thereby increasing average faculty salary, another U.S. News data point), then made it understood that since they did not really need all that money they were expected to donate it all back to the school (thereby increasing the alumni giving rate, another U.S. News data point): three birds with one stone! (I gather the new Case law dean has put an end to these shenanigans.)

Worth reading the whole thing (even though Budiansky’s site has one of those annoying and anti-social ‘if you cut and paste text from my site, you will get unasked for cruft about how you ought to click on the original link added to your pasted text’ installations).

That wasn’t totally unreasonable because they are less effective for women who have never given birth vaginally, being more likely to be expelled. I think there was also a misguided consensus that you couldn’t dilate a woman’s cervix enough to insert the device unless she had previously given birth. Today, as I understand it, manufacturers produce a smaller size to solve this problem.

I was on the pill for about 10 years. I always had trouble with it, experiencing breakthrough bleeding (basically you get your period twice a month, no thank you) and other various side effects including, in my opinion, exacerbation of depression. I got switched around to more types than I can remember in an attempt to find one that was acceptable.

Here’s what’s great about the copper IUD: no hormones! The copper makes your womb inhospitable to a fertilized egg, for reasons that I think are still somewhat unknown. So, maybe an egg is fertilized, but it can’t attach itself and begin appropriating resources to build a placenta. I’m not sure whether this counts as baby-killing to the anti-abortion crowd; probably yes, even though the definition of getting pregnant involves a fertilized egg implanting itself in your uterus. Not just, you know, hanging around briefly. (Do these people really think when they go to heaven they will be vastly outnumbered by the souls of fertilized eggs who failed to implant and were washed away during menses? That’s going to be some boring conversation right there. Will those little dudes be casting down their teeny, tiny golden crowns around the glassy sea? I call bullshit; I don’t think anti-abortion people believe that at all.)

Insertion of the device does hurt. It only takes a few seconds, though, and then you don’t have to do anything about it for several years. The main reason women have the device removed it that it causes heavier bleeding during their period. My experience was that this was (dramatically!) true at first, but that my body then adjusted.

Obviously the IUD does nothing to protect you from STDs. But it’s not competing with condoms in this area, it’s competing with the pill. Pregnancy rates are lower when using IUDs than when being on the pill, probably because it’s very difficult to be a perfect pill user. Guys may think it sounds easy: you take one a day, end of story. But sometimes you forget if you’ve taken it or not; actions repeated so frequently have a tendency to blur together. Or you end up staying out super-late and crashing at your friend’s place. In theory you’re meant to add condoms to the mix at that point until you start taking a new set, but in real life people often don’t bother. Part of the appeal of the IUD is that you don’t have to do anything.

My only jealousy now is of the new pills where you only get your period 4 times a year. That would be great! Let’s face it: getting your period is a pain. There’s blood everywhere! Who needs it? It’s true that it can be the most welcome sight in all the world, when you have been sitting there thinking you might be pregnant, and wondering what the hell to do about it. And suddenly these is a cadmium red solution to all your problems. Otherwise: lame. So, ladies, IUDs are great and you should consider them.

UPDATES: One commenter notes that although we don’t know how the IUD works, it seems to work primarily by inhibiting fertilization, and only secondarily by preventing implantation. So we all win, including the little dudes with the tiny crowns. Another commenter who survived a pregnancy while his/her mother was using an IUD wants me to point out that this is a possibility, and that grave birth defects can result. This is true, and something my doctor mentioned to me. The failure rate is incredibly low, but if the IUD does fail the consequences can be very serious for the developing fetus (if not fatal before the fetus is viable outside the womb, which is more likely).

Yeah OK, but Chuck Brown, with or without The Soul Searchers, is considered the “Godfather of Go-Go,” did everybody change their kit later? And do all mostly black musical sub-genres have to have someone named “Brown” be the godfather of them? And “it was because they couldn’t afford bigger congas” has urban legend written all over it. Anyway, yeah, a whole bunch of congas and bells and whatnot. The only time a white DC audience ever heard that many drum solos was when Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train” concert was in town. (Before Randy Rhoads died in that tragic plane accident at Ozzy’s ranch. Who knows what magic might be flying off the fretboard of his distinctive “Flying V” right now. I’ll tell you all about my deep, deep love of “Tribute” and how I cry when I listen to “Goodbye to Romance” another time.)

Yeah, anyway, why two Rare Essence songs? OK, they’re my fave go-go band. But also I think this shows the evolution of the genre from something like funk to an intriguing version of hip-hop backed with live percussion and horns. It has continued to evolve, and is still popular in the DC metro area despite never making it anywhere else. Well, that’s not quite true, in that the music has been heavily sampled for other hip-hop songs which are then, perforce, go-go.

This is ye olde skuel, “Body Moves.” It’s special because it includes the DC slang word “sice” in the call and response at the end. “Sice” is more or less entirely equivalent to “psych,” (I’m siced for this party!) but can’t be negative (you can’t “sice someone out.”):

Back in the crack epidemic years go-go clubs were the site of lots of crime and shootings, and since the DC City Council is a bunch of morons, they decided to solve this problem by banning certain clubs from playing go-go. Ha ha pretend. NO RLY! One wonders whether, if such a club were to play, say, Nelly’s “Hot in Herre” (not that it would be a good idea, mind you) whether the club would be in violation, since the main loop is a sample from Chuck Brown’s “Busting Loose.” (Notice Chuck saying “give me the bridge now,” in 1978, that’s the oldest song I know that does that.) “It’s go-go!” “But it’s just a sample. It’s as if there are invisible quotes around the go-go that make it safe!” I could imagine the liquor license board debates getting pretty metaphysical. Next up is Rare Essence’s most popular ever song. It even made it to Yo! MTV Raps, as you can see (video way worth watching).

It is a testament to how not gentrified parts of DC are that I still don’t know where the hell Montana or Minnesota Avenues is. They’re getting the shout-outs, I assume they’re in S.E., but damn, that’s a lot of not knowing shit about your hometown. Go-go’s just weird in that none of its practitioners have ever hit the big time, even though it’s more or less next to New York. Even little old Savannah, GA has had more success in this regard (Outkast). I was originally going to defend disco from its detractors in the Don Cornelius thread who complained there was only one beat and the bass could never stray, and that was bad, by showing a) the bass can walk all over the damn place, and b) no harm in having generic constraints. Do you hate Loleatta Holloway and the SalSoul Orchestra, I intended to ask? Do you hate dancing (N.B. there is a go-go break in that song, “212 North 12th St.”)? Do you hate life itself? Then I got distracted. Squirrel! What? John insisted on the title. Brought to you by Stuff White People Like.

DISTURBING UPDATE: People born on the day Blackstreet’s “No Diggity” was at #1 are old enough to comment on youtube now. I mean, I know stray dogs comment on youtube, but still. Possibly more disturbing: I have a sweet-tooth weakness for this song.

NOT PARTICULARLY DISTURBING AT ALL UPDATE: If you find the openly proffered go-go unpalatable, then listen to the more funk-like Chuck Brown track linked above. You will probably like it more. If you like funk, which you probably do, because it’s funk, and all.

Having worked, for precisely one semester, at an adjunct job that paid about $2k, if memory serves, along with other indignities, I totally endorse this project.

(2) The True Life of the Mind. Academics are devoted to the true pursuit of knowledge, and gain immaterial benefits therefrom. This may be disturbed by the intrusion of grubby material considerations such as ‘money’ and ‘working conditions’ into relationships that should surely be subordinated to purely intellectual concerns. There surely is something to the claim that academics, including TAs and RAs, get some benefits from pursuing knowledge – that is why many, perhaps most, of us are in it. But, for most of us well established professors, it is rather easier to pursue this life since we are doing so from a position of relative comfort and stability. Few professors e.g. would be willing to endure genuine material privations to pursue knowledge for its own sake (there are a few virtuosos and saints no doubt, but hardly enough to make the system work). And the numbers of professors who care more about salary raises and parking spaces than disinterested intellectual inquiry is rather higher than one might like. In short – I don’t think that professors can reasonably demand ideals from TAs/RAs that they themselves would have great trouble living up to.

(3) The Laboratory Leviathan. Here, the presumed claim is that the kinds of intense collaborative environments that characterize e.g. research labs require good working relationships if they are to work. This is best provided by allowing the principal investigator effective carte blanche – so that when someone pisses the PA off, they need to leave, if necessary with forcible encouragement, lest they poison this precious relationship. This set of claims is recognizably a version of Hobbes’ argument for absolutist rule in Leviathan. And it is subject to all the problems thereof. Most simply, it ends up being a pretty nice deal for the absolutist ruler, but not so much for his or her subjects (there is some incentive for the ruler to look to the interests of the ruled, but not very much). More generally, the literature on trust and collaboration, as I read it (I am a participant in these debates, and hence not disinterested) would seem to me to suggest that collaboration works better in a system where hierarchical subordinates do not live in fear of being canned summarily if they do something to annoy the boss. Protections against this certainly may be a nuisance for the boss, but the argument that they are likely to undermine collaboration seems to me a weak one.

(4) We Are Obliged to Screw You by the Forces of Ruthless Competition. A variant of (3) which emphasizes the competitive nature of the research environment, scrabbling for grants etc, and how this limits the choices available to PAs, forcing them to require 80 hour workweeks and such. You can make this argument – but if you want to make it, it is equally, if not more true for companies in the private sector, which typically face even harsher competitive pressures. If you seriously think that this is a viable claim, you have to either come up with an account of how research labs face even tougher competition than small private sector firms, or line up with the US Chamber of Commerce hacks. Which will then oblige you to come up with a compelling account of how respecting workers’ rights invariably hurts quality etc, which (in my, again doubtless subjective opinion), is a quite tall order, especially given that lots of labs (just like lots of firms) seem to thrive quite nicely in countries where they are obliged to recognize rights.

(5) Cos We Are Too Jedi Masters! Or, at Least, We Are Masters with Apprentices, Who Should Be Humble So That They Can Learn from Our Tutelage By Working. This is, to be blunt, an ideological confection. The idea that guilds used to do right by their apprentices in the good old days is, as best as I can tell from a reading of the history, fiction. Abuses of apprentices, and indeed journeymen were rife in history. The nub of truth in this argument is that students can learn by doing, and later put those skills to good use. But workers learn by doing in pretty well any workplace you can mention. Again – it seems to me to be hard to make a good argument that academic labs are somehow unique in this respect.

(6) Will No-One Think of the Students? Usually applied to TAs rather than RAs, and used to suggest that the victims of graduate student organization efforts will be the unfortunate students taking courses. Seen in its most fully-fledged form in the last outbreak of this debate on CT, where David Velleman proposed that the appropriate solution was to terminate all the brutes. Again, rather difficult for any leftist to maintain without giving up on organizing rights wholesale, since labor action in any sector usually ends up inconveniencing customers/clients/end users.

I imagine that some commenters will disagree with these characterizations of the relevant arguments, or come up with new ones. But I can’t for the life of me see how one could be generally on the left and in favor of organizing rights, without extending that set of principles to the academy. The justifications that I’ve seen for drawing distinctions, arguing that the academy is Truly Special are pretty remarkably underwhelming, and seem to me to be a variety of forms of special pleading on behalf of a case that isn’t actually that special. This isn’t necessarily to doubt the sincerity of those doing the pleading – it’s easy to believe in the worth of social arrangements that you are used to and that (perhaps in some cases) benefit you – but belief on its own does not make people’s arguments good or convincing.

At the age of six, Polanski began a life of persecution, flight and the threat of incarceration – first from the Nazi invaders of Poland, then an oppressive communist regime, and finally the American criminal justice system after his newfound sense of freedom led him into transgression. The world must seem a prison, society a succession of traps, civilised values a deceptive veneer, life itself a battle against fate.

Like a number of other people, I posted a comment on the site. I can’t reproduce my comment exactly, because it has now been deleted for “violation of community standards” but it read something like “What? ‘transgression’ hardly seems to be an appropriate word.” Other commenters have been deleted, again for “violation of community standards” merely for quoting Mr French’s exculpatory paragraph in extenso and say that it is “ludicrous”. The Guardian’s guidelines on “community standards” are here. They are not unreasonable and contain the assurance:

In short: – If you act with maturity and consideration for other users, you should have no problems.

It is hard, therefore, to see why politely objecting to Mr French’s words should provoke deletion. Apparently, the Guardian thinks otherwise.

I’ve seen what I understand to be the email in which Dibbern’s supervisor (who, by Dibbern’s account, was vehemently opposed to the organization effort) first states concerns about Dibbern’s lack of focus, a few weeks before she is summarily kicked out. The email, after laying out a number of general complaints (that Dibbern seems unfocused; that she had not emailed a colleague about doing some work on Sunday, although she had gone ahead and done the work) goes on to say:

I realize you have many other things going on but an increased [sic] in your focus on research is urgently needed. This will probably require you to decrease your involvement in non-research related activities.

Dibbern states in her timeline that in a person-to-person meeting a couple of days later:

Goldman repeatedly instructed Ms. Dibbern to stop all outside activity, this time in person. When Ms. Dibbern asked for clarification, Goldman stated, “you know what I mean.”

On the face of it, this seems problematic. If a student RA under my supervision was deeply involved in some political or social cause that I vehemently disagreed with, say, campaigning for the mass deportation of immigrants, I don’t think it would be at all appropriate for me to suggest that they stop doing this, especially in the context of an email suggesting they were falling down on the job and needed to start pulling their weight or else. Obviously, my students’ political opinions and activities should be their own business, and I think it would be entirely reasonable for the student to interpret my suggestion as a threat. If I felt that they weren’t doing their job properly, I’d say so – but I wouldn’t for a moment connect this criticism to their extraneous political activities (how they manage their time to carry out their various responsibilities is entirely up to them).

Under the most generous reading that I can come up with, communications along the lines described are wide-open to misinterpretation. And the generous reading is certainly not the only possible reading. It is quite possible that there is another side, or other sides to this story (supervisor-supervisee relationships can be complicated, and battles like this often have a Rashomon quality to them). Still, at the very least, there is enough of a question here that a blow-off ‘move on: nothing to see here’ press statement from a university official is very definitely unsatisfactory.

The Soul Train Youtube channel is generally amazing, and I am so buying a boxset now. The sound quality on this one isn’t as good, but a)it’s Marvin Gaye singing Distant Lover b) the look on the woman’s face at 2.02 when he comes down to sing into the crowd is truly beautiful. I know what you’re saying. “Belle Waring, I am a busy person and even though I am skiving off work I do not have 5 minutes to spare listening to one of the greatest singers of all time singing a beautiful sad song.” Well OK, Ms./Mr. Thing, you can listen to it open in another tab while you read a blog post write your journal article. Or you could watch Marvin Gaye in a knitted hat, charming the pants off of every person so inclined as to have their pants charmed off by a dude, and frankly, probably no small number who didn’t think they were in the “a dude can charm my pants off” crowd. Wishing you peace, love, and soul.

I’m now doubly grateful to all of you who stepped up and donated to PP. Because unlike Komen, they’re actually in the business of providing health care to women, rather than to just our most uncontroversial and marketable body parts.

(If you feel the need, you can tell Komen to fuck off here.)

What is this about? Naturally it’s caused Greek public opinion to explode in fury. The sober-minded middle classes can put up with with a bit of external intervention to break domestic political log-jams. And while the ‘technocratic’ government is trying hard to do what is asked of them, it’s found it difficult to fix the faulty revenue system and to make hard spending cut choices for an economy that is already contracting horribly sharply. But the historical and political insensitivity of the proposal leaves me astonished. Sebastian Dellepiane has reminded me that economists seem to find it all too easy to dispatch politics into the rubbish bin when they are convinced they have the right technical answers – see this amazing piece of finger-wagging to Argentina in 2002.

It seems so obvious both from economic theory and from empirical evidence that what Europe badly needs right now is a policy mix that will generate economic growth and facilitate job creation. The forthcoming EU summit is at least going to talk about this (though I’m not holding my breath). So why the heavy warnings?

Some commentators seem to think it is not really a warning shot to Greece at all, and not the start of a campaign to force them out of the eurozone, since this is still officially anathema. Rather it’s a warning of a particularly unsubtle kind (‘Germany doesn’t do “subtle” very well’) to other heavily indebted countries (Ireland, Portugal, Spain) not to think about going after a similar kind of PSI (private sector involvement) deal. All creditors in future are going to be repaid in full for everything. Now. Or else.

It’s hard not to be really dispirited by all this. Everyone except the top decision-makers in the EU seem to agree that it is damaging to require heavily indebted countries to undertake further crushing fiscal contractions in the middle of a recession, and indeed that trying to do intensive deleveraging without any growth might even itself trigger a debt explosion. The President of the World Bank thinks it is German’s responsibility to show decisive leadership in stimulating the European economy and generating growth. But with Merket beset by government colleagues criticizing her for ‘watering down’ the so-called fiscal pact, how likely is this?