Oh, the elite, or the admin class, or the middling white managerial class, how they are confounding it all, and nary a real activist sees that we are cooked until we wipe them away from positions of power.
I appreciate all the work of environmentalists, for sure, and on this Memorial Day, how does that fit into the scheme of green things? How does it fit when we have liquid gas coming to Coos Bay, Oregon, or Vancouver, WA. How does it all mix when we all have given the valley of death and the valley of hope to the legal ones, the barristers, the second, third and first-tier lawyering class, these people like Obama, or worse, who have corralled people into a continual stream of consumption, endless growth, sprawl and debt.
Faculty Unionizing,
Students Screwed to a Higher Degree at the Tier One Colleges that Pay Presidents Mas y Mas/
Hunger Strikes, Hunger Games/
Five Easy Pieces of Advice from Leaders in Education Who Can’t and Will Never Teach!
See how that works. Simple microcosmic illustration, here, in small-time Vancouver, Clark College, yet, whew, look at it, this is emblematic of our times, the tyranny of the Admin Class, Dean-lets, the Boards of Education, Regents, whatever you want to call the most OUT OF TOUCH humans on earth – the antithesis of education, scholarship, rhetoric, critical thinking, education. These people are running faculty into their graves. Sending students packing into debt hell, into neutered hell, into the end times of thinking, or anything reliable now in the classroom.
Here, in Vancouver and environs, we have a state school, Clark Community College, though they cut the Community from the title, for obvious reasons of pure marketing crap, as if college means more to a human, to the paper the AA degree or now four-year degree is printed on?
Killing community from both the name of the college, and the point of the education. The point of communities – oh, farms, hospitals, schools, small businesses, culture, hell, even small churches. Recreation, hell, safety and I suppose what the entire game is supposed to be – survival, fairness, life, retraction against the tyrannical class.
I’ve been writing about precarious workers, faculty, the entire lie of working us, the majority, to the bone, firing us with a few flippant student evaluations, the rotten tenured class and department heads who have euthanized history, activism, dignity and the tools to fight the very villains who call themselves provosts and HR heads, and development directors, marketing mavens, gifts and giving creeps.
So, the debt is insurmountable, and the job market rigged by the Kochs, Bloombergs, Gates, HPs, the entire lot of them, those retailers, and the few corporations that are still in business in this country as makers or builders of things. This story is about the fugue leaders, as in the presidents of colleges that throw themselves the most money who are proud to say their colleges are the ones with the most student debt. What heroes, and they get money thrown at them, conferences tailored to their misanthropy, and they have hundreds under them, each, on their privatizing team, all those yes men, and mostly yes women, now. That price of feminism, more people of both genders who have sold us all out. They talk an alternative language, and they are a species of their own. Try it out sometime, attending a meeting they hold, or some mumbo-jumbo BS talk they have on “leadership” (sic-sic).
So, Clark College (minus-COMMUNITY), like the universities and and colleges around this country, and in other countries, hire on scabs, hire on us, the precarious, the part-time and the nontenured. They have been hiring us on in droves since the 1970s, and we are at a point where colleges are run by Wannabe One Percenters, these MBA and institutional leadership creeps, and the bulk of the faculty are in the cross hairs of American exceptionalism, the poverty strewn world of the elites and their little Eichmanns, keeping clocks running, [urchasing useless junk like software spewing retrograde crap in our schools, all for the love of keeping students at bay and holding their intellect like Playdough.
So, the colleges here and in all 50 states hire on people as temps, freeway fliers, and that commitment to them is as superficial as the commitment made by our politicians and our leaders. We teach when enrollments go up, and we are sacked a quarter or more later. So, Clark College, the big main campus, and entire multi-campus unit, is in a $3 million shortfall, is sacking part-timers, you know, last to hire first to fire mentality, by the leadership. This former military creep, head of the school, his big bucks and his minions following him, and the entire joke, since he is anti-intellectual, anti-learning, but a whore to the dollar.
Cutting teachers, cutting the good classes, like humanities, film studies, history, drama, lit., you name it, these ex-Colonels who we throw money at, they cut what disturbs them, and, alas, while these emails hit our Outlook boxes hourly, about “don't count on summer jobs, don't count on anything in the Fall, but stay tuned, and just hang on, and, well, we will be contacting you if anything changes,”we get emails about millions of dollars to buy land from some private guy who "donated" $3.1 million after he got in his pocked the money for the same land. You know, a fire sale, from $9.1 million for 60 acres down to $6 million in his pocket.
This is the deal: the school is in massive cutting, massive financial straits, but, heck, some benefactor from Holland, some immigrant as the college PR folk said, gave the school some money, or was it land, to build a satellite campus, a few miles north, in a rural scape.
Read closely, and see that economic unlimited growth mentioned, and economists, and county economic development folk. Read this, and weep, because these people are in business to make money, to sell land, to plow, bulldoze, build, outfit, landscape and service with TAX PAYER money. The end result, a bricks and mortar satellite facility with more precarious workers -- faculty -- and more numb-nuts ideas from the women and men of the Admin Managerial Deanlet CEO class.
Clark College Foundation has finalized the purchase of nearly 60 acres through a generous $3.1 million gift from the Boschma Family LLC. Additionally, the foundation will pay $6 million for the land. The acreage is located in Ridgefield on the east side of North 65 Avenue, north of Pioneer Street and northeast of the Interstate 5 and Pioneer Street interchange.
The leadership gift from the Boschma family was key in being able to move forward on this project. In making the more than $3.1 million gift, Hank and Bernice Boschma said they were excited to be a part of expanding educational opportunities for students in the region, including first generation and immigrant students.
You’ll be interested to know that the Boschma family’s introduction to Clark College was when Hank and Bernice took a citizenship course in preparation for the national exam after emigrating from Holland. One of their daughters also attended Clark.
The timing of this is good for the campus and good for the community we serve. In April, the Washington State Board of Community and Technical Colleges prioritized building projects for the upcoming biennium. According to that prioritization, the North County Campus building will receive design funding in the 2017-2019 budget, and likely receive construction funding in the 2019-2021 budget.
The gift and acquisition represent a long-term visionary chapter for the growth anticipated at Clark College. The college’s 2007 Facilities Master Plan identified North County as a growth area based on projections from regional economists, and the most recent update of the Facilities Master Plan reinforced the need for a facility in this part of our service area.
Can you believe the audacity of these managerial class losers? Planning to build another campus while deciding to kill jobs and, get this, adding more fees on to the already struggling students – $2 per credit. Big plans, these ex-colonels and MBAs and Institutional Management PhDs have for us all. You know what I have written about if you have kept up with my gig here at DV – these simpletons, running the show, the rotten rats, who fee and levy and tax and fine and surtax and poll tax and user fee and gouge us -- faculty, community members and especially the students - in an ever-living hell of death by a million pennies just to breathe AIR.
So, that little issue of climate change, sprawl, endless traffic, greenspaces gobbled up by the people that have to come, if they build the satellite campus, which they will, oh, heck, how do we then stop all the energy waste, energy flow, with that sort of mentality? Can you imagine what this says about the entire shooting match? About fighting for a world that HAS to plan for disasterous Climate Change? Do these rotten over-paid whores to capital CARE? What's their 10- and 20-year plan? You know the answer -- endless trips to Costco, retirement, golf, rollerblading, Winabego-ing into their hells. How does building another campus node do a thing to mitigate that issue of roads, single occupancy vehicle trips, the entire stupidity of campuses that are 50 to 60 percent under-utilzed? Then the matter of what great courses will be studied? What will this campus out in rural-scape be? Another degree in fabrication of robot parts? Boeing and General Dynamics designed curricula? How will they be taught? What sort of teachers will be the material deliverers? How much power will be taken away from faculty and moved to the Institutional Leadership liars and the admin class and their cronies and the business elite who are there with fat hands at the taxpayer funding trough?
Do you have the answer yet, or do you need to read some of my PAST pieces, all satire and sane in one fell swoop?
Fat-jowl presidents, one after another, in their CEO class of community killing warriors, heralding this accomplishment, a new campus soon, in the middle of fields of Johnson grass, strawberries, huge secluded and lock-gate homes, the castle is my home groupies, sort of interestingly evangelical types in the middle of cow fields and tree farms. You know, the society of whites who want nothing to do with riffraff, nothing to do with the masses. Two acres, private jungle gym, alpacas for pets, triple SUV garage, a kitchen big enough for ten Cambodian families to live in. I know these people, as I drive on my bicycle, as each month I find the side mirrors of their Lexus SUVs and BMWs get closer and closer to my elbows, back, rear tire.
So, I wonder, how serious we all are in this game of stripping us of our power as community builders, in this battle against the money changers, the privatizers, those people who are the cogs and gears in the systems of the Monsantos, General Dynanics, Bayers, University of Phoenixes, CocaColas, that great morass that is the MADAPE complex that at this point relies on compliants and takers and fearful ones, even those of us in the 80 percent class. MADAPE – MediaAcademicDefenseAgriculturePrisonEnergy COMPLEX.
These people, presidents, are not wholly respected behind their backs, but that is the crime is it not, this mealy-mouthed society of people afraid to take these people head on, and in mass. Collectively.
So, below, quit a list of items tied to adjunct faculty action, inaction, exploitation, movement, unionism, and our culture of voyerism looking at all of our plights with frog necks and bug-eyes.
CCSF STRUGGLE UPDATES
1. Assembly member Tom Ammiano calls for more time for CCSf and a return to elected Board
2. SF Chronicle editorial "Give CCSF Time to Succeed"
3. No break in fight to save CCSF
4. Nation blog on fight to save SF's public college
5. Latest updates from Marty Hittelman, author of "ACCJC gone wild" (college accreditors)
We write in solidarity with homeless adjunct faculty member Mary-Faith Cerasoli, who is currently in the seventh day of a desperate and determined hunger strike.
Mary-Faith Cerasoli's experience exemplifies the impact of a broken system of academic employment on more than one million adjunct faculty and their students. Mary-Faith speaks four languages, has a master's degree from Middlebury College, and previously taught Advanced Placement languages in the New York City public schools. She has been an adjunct professor since 2011. She teaches five classes a semester; her annual income is $22,000 per year. She has also been homeless since 2011. Mary-Faith has a life-threatening thyroid disease; until this week, she was denied the Medicaid coverage that would have enabled her to get consistent, life-sustaining treatment.
Mary-Faith has tried everything one person can try to mitigate her plight. She has appealed to college administrators and the New York City Board of Education. She has contacted legislators and the governor, written letters and made phone calls, protested at the New York Department of Education in Albany, and exposed the circumstances of her life to public inspection-and the inspection of her students-through appeals to the media.
Mary-Faith has done everything professional middle-class people are taught to do to redress injustice. None of it has worked. She is now engaged in a hunger strike that dramatizes the absurdity and unfairness of her unconscionable marginalization.
We affirm the right of every individual, acting in accordance with the leadings of his or her own conscience, to engage in nonviolent protest like Mary-Faith's. This broken system must be ended and replaced with one that is sustainable-and sustaining of both the new faculty majority and the students and parents who pay such a heavy price for higher education. To that end, our actions must be taken not only individually, but in large numbers and coordinated ways, and we commit ourselves-as individuals and in our organizations-to continue our work towards those outcomes.
Mary-Faith's protest energizes us in our work for a sustainable system of academic employment. We hope that it also galvanizes others in the movement of adjunct faculty and their allies-in and out of unions-who are currently building movements and organizations of the more than one million adjunct faculty members in the United States.
A higher ground is within our reach; we have to unite and fight together to get there.
UPDATES IN BRIEF AND LINKS
1. The plight of the non-renewed.
2. Fastfood workers strikes across the nation and solidarity actions in world.
3. Martin Goldstein has written a favorable book review of Keith Hoeller's Equality for Contingent Faculty that appears on page 5 of the Spring 2014 issue of the California Communty College Journal. It's viewable at CPFA.
4. Northeastern U (Boston, MA) adjuncts vote for union
and elsewhere in US with SEIU:
More than 21,000 strong.
That’s the number of adjunct and part-time faculty who’ve formed unions under the SEIU/Adjunct Action umbrella, after two big wins this week for adjunct faculty at Northeastern University in Boston and Mills College in Oakland, CA who voted to form unions.
“Winning our union election shows what you can do when you work together and have the support of your local community,” said Anne Fleche, an adjunct faculty member at Northeastern who teaches film. “I'm so glad that our success today may help empower other workers, including adjunct faculty like ourselves, to change working and learning conditions in higher education.”
Northeastern adjuncts have formed the largest part-time faculty union in Boston, where approximately 2,000 adjunct faculty at Tufts University, Lesley University, and Northeastern are now united as part of the metro organizing strategy.
The victories yesterday are just the start of what will be an exciting summer for adjuncts. Part-time faculty at dozens of schools are working to unite with their colleagues in SEIU, and many are scheduled to vote soon or have filed for union elections, including adjuncts at the University of the District of Columbia, the San Francisco Art Institute in the Bay Area, Laguna College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, Seattle University, Marist College in New York State and Hamline University and Macalester College in Minnesota.
Share the news of the victories and get more people onboard! Click here to share a Facebook photo.
We’ll keep you apprised of news throughout the summer, from organizing updates to trainings and policy. Share your thoughts on Twitter and Facebook about these exciting developments using the hashtag #AdjunctAction.
Best, Malini Cadambi Daniel
Director, Higher Education Campaign, Adjunct Action
© Adjunct Action
Our mailing address is:
1800 Massachusetts Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20036
5. FYI - a majority of [full-time, over 50%] Non-Tenure Track Faculty at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign have filed for a union.
6. Progressives win union elections in MA and LA, lose closely in Seattle
and In These Times once and twice.
7. Mary Faith ends fast when Governor’s office promises meeting
9. Art schools unionize
10. Think being an adjunct professor is hard? Try being a Black adjunct professor
11. Marc Bousquet on MLA executive salaries, adjunct and grads. Also see comments.
12. Report of fast food strikes in US and internationally.
13. Adjunct World comics
14. Student debt and number of low wage faculty rising fastest at state universities with highest paid presidents [surprise]
The One Percent at State U
New report finds that student debt and low-wage faculty labor are rising faster at state universities with the highest-paid presidents
Washington, D.C. — An Institute for Policy Studies report featured in the New York Times today finds student debt and low-wage faculty labor are rising faster at state universities with the highest-paid presidents.
‘The One Percent at State U’ examines the 25 state universities that paid out the most in executive compensation from 2005 to 2012.Executive pay at these schools reached an average of nearly $1 million by 2012 while student debt and low-wage faculty rose much faster than national averages.
“The high executive pay obviously isn’t the direct cause of higher student debt, or cuts in labor spending,” co-author Dr. Marjorie Wood told the New York Times. “But if you think about it in terms of the allocation of resources, it does seem to be the tip of a very large iceberg, with universities that have top-heavy executive spending also having more adjuncts, more tuition increases and more administrative spending.”
Report link: **
Infographic link: **
KEY FINDINGS:
At the 25 state universities with the highest-paid presidents:
• average executive pay rose to nearly $1 million by 2012–increasing more than twice as fast as the national average at peer institutions.
• student debt is rising faster than at state universities as a whole.
• spending on administration outstripped scholarship spending by more than 2 to 1.
• part-time adjunct increased more than twice as fast as the national average at all universities.
• permanent faculty declined dramatically, making up less than half of all faculty by 2012.
The report ranks the worst offenders across all categories: excessive executive pay, rising student debt, inflated administrative expenditures, and increases in low-wage and temporary faculty labor. The top 5 worst offenders across the board were:
1. Ohio State University
2. Penn State
3. University of Minnesota
4. University of Michigan
5. University of Washington