Oh, ya. Riffing off my piece on the false flag attacks on the youth of our world, calling them the distracted generation, Generation Me, the Dumbest Generations Ever, Google, Inc. What have you. Read it here, “Distracted, Facebooking, Entitled?” I am forever on these list serves from faculty, climate change workers, ecologists, political radicals, and more, and, well, the amount of repetition in the entire mess is stupefying, really.
We have so many fissures in the entire USA project on faux democracy and freedom: cops that kill with each nervous tic; CEOs who should be sent to Devil’s Island; media who are as articulate as Bozo the Clown; diseased thinkers running the HR-Admin Class, which in turn have hijacked our lives in Every City, USA.
People can’t think out of a wet wipe these days, and the radical depend on the same old chosen few at Counterpunch, Chomsky, Democracy Later (Now, Gilad’s name for Amy Goodman Soros Network).
So, more and more mush from Amazon Dot Washington Post, NYT, and the rags like Newsspeak, Time (out) and the like. We have not gotten past the argument — why do faculty get paid so little when they have so much of America at stake?
Really? College boys and girls in the Obama Administration emblematic of the fallen arches Ivy League Georgetown U types. Have you watched these State Department folk and press talker folk talk? Oh my god!
I have been in this fight since I was an undergraduate at the U of Arizona, Tucson. Adjuncts and graduate PhD assistants getting screwed teaching me as a punk. Think 1975.
Wow, ten years later, and a million miles as a journalist, activist journalist, small town and medium sized town, rural, county, metro, cop beat, drugs, sex and rock and roll. I was a dive master at 20, and I had the thrill of going into Mexico weekends to do check out dives in the World’s Aquarium, the Sea of Cortez. I was to be an abused adjunct, underpaid, underfed, under-appreciated, exploited (sounded like my newspaper days). El Paso, 1986, done with graduate school and TA-ship life!
I am old enough to tell ya’ll that is no aquarium anymore – sucked clean and dry, and the hammerheads I saw in the hundreds going to a sea mount near Cabo San Lucas, Baja, have not returned. That was a breeding circle, amazing as a kid diver in the middle of it, as the strongest females and males ended up in the center of the spiral 120 feet down.
Nice gene pool reclamation, now, apex predator, vanished. That shifting baseline, for someone 58, is stuff college folk and youth do not want to hear. In many cases, see, hear and speak no evil is the new Brave 1984 World!
This is the problem now – so many blind spots, sort of backwards journalism, as you can see from this Atlantic magazine article just out on adjuncts — see, “The Cost of an Adjunct — The plight of non-tenured professors is widely known, but what about the impact they have on the students they’re hired to instruct? ”
It is rehashed, remixed, mumbo jumbo. The same story that came out five years ago. Almost to a fault … to the semi-colon.
It’s mystifying how controlled and contrite the argument is around paying faculty shit for teaching. This is the allure of college, to be part of the capitalist system. To teach in schools that promulgate the war machine and the economic hit men, while a few greenie weenies try and divest from coal?
The dumbdowning and inanity of the liberal consumer. And that consumer is the teacher, professor, and many students, though what a possibility, intellectually strangling the war-drug-ag-energy-military-HR-IT-pharm stranglehold on our youth, even after 12 years of schooling in the dungeons of testing, new hardware and software, the end of independent teaching.
So, when I come across this article, “The Cost of an Adjunct,” I see some of the same usual suspects I knew when I was organizing adjuncts in WA state for SEIU, another corrupt union. Imagine the same people making an industry of “Speaking for Me.” An echo chamber of the same drivel.
These people will never question authority, question the project that is American and White Dominating destruction of the world. The education system still teaches and trains youth to know the master from the slave, and we are the slaves – to the rotten consumer pop art-culture. Amazingly really bad, sodium pentathol consumerism: the music, the sports, the film, the art, the tragically hip architecture, the so-called creative class.
As long as there is a job going strong providing nothing to the world, another app, another video game, another monetary system to make money off of nanoseconds of human sweat. More stuff to track us, to fine us, to charge us. The very act of living is expensive, and college is about sticking to that paradigm.
So, screw the Atlantic, and all those repeating the same story, over and over, no new speakers, no new radical perspectives, no in your face “the systems needs more than overhauling – it needs girting and strangulation.”
These are weak-limp wrist times, and the followers and rule makers and rule abiders are the college educated, the people in the shadows, people with no other thing to do but to make money off of someone else’s labor.
Then this article goes on about diminished services to students. Services? This is the lie, the big scam. Poorly paid people work harder than rich ones, and we as adjuncts have a million ways to be creative with our lowly paid time, and we are very-very pissed off and offended by the offenders of our continuing criminal enterprise system called US of Israel, err, US Murder, Inc.
Yet, the same bumbling quotes saying students and parents are short-changed by our adjunct status. We are short changed, but we do not cut corners. My students get the proverbial 110 percent of my blood, sweat and tears. I’ve been fired from many a gig for my revolutionary espousing, and I have never been protected by the tenured class, the gladhanders, the ones who never want change, unless it’s a change of software and less hands on time.
So, repetition be damned. The Atlantic, another mainstream musher:
Students may not be aware of these behind-the-scenes discrepancies. College brochures and course registration websites don’t distinguish between their adjunct and tenured faculty, and popular college guides and rankings fail to provide adjunct data for specific schools. Olson said, “students don’t know the difference. They think if you teach college, then you’re a professor. They think we make a $100,000 per year.” Maisto echoed Olson’s concerns, arguing that parents are focused on “cost and prestige” and aren’t as focused on quality. Some adjuncts are determined to make this information more transparent with public rallies, crowd sourced data, and walkouts. Both Olson and Maisto also urged that it’s up to students and their parents, too, to include the status of adjuncts in their criteria when shopping for colleges.
Ahh, Maria Maisto, cashing in on her position with Faculty Majority. Here, listen to Zinn, Howard. I have found that the teacher’s union AFT has endorsed getting rid of the People’s History of the United States for high school. Here, first, read my piece: “Kicking Howard Zinn in his Grave.” Amazingly, the faculty now are fighting over pay, not the destruction, the carpet bombing of education, department-by-department!
Description: Americans have long embraced a notion of superiority, claims Howard Zinn. Governor Winthrop of the Massachusetts Bay Colony described establishing “a city on a hill,” to serve the world as a beacon of liberty. So far, so good. But driving this sense of destiny, says Zinn, was an assumption of divine agency “an association between what the government does and what God approves of.” And too frequently, continues Zinn, Americans have invoked God to expand “into someone else’s territory, occupying and dealing harshly with people who resist occupation.” Zinn offers numerous examples of how the American government has used “divine ordination” and rationales of spreading civilization and freedom to justify its most dastardly actions: the extermination of Native Americans and takeover of their land; the annexation of Texas and war with Mexico; war against the Philippines; U.S. involvement in coups in Latin America; bloody efforts to expand U.S. influence in the Middle East, Africa and Asia. The battle against Communism, often bolstered by arguments of America’s divine mission in the world, was merely a convenient excuse to maintain U.S. economic and military interests in key regions. Today, says Zinn, we have a president, who more than any before him, claims a special relationship with God. Zinn worries about an administration that deploys Christian zealotry to justify a war against terrorism, a war that in reality seems more about establishing a new beachhead in the oil-rich Middle East. He also sees great danger in Bush’s doctrines of unilateralism and pre-emptive war, which mark a great leap away from international standards of morality.