And If You Give Us A Full Book Of Green Stamps, You Can Teach Macroeconomics

These noble bloggers provided the second notification of the evening that Patricia Turner, vice provost for the University of California Office of Undergraduate Studies (and henchman Winder McConnell, the director of teaching resources for that floundering institution) have a great new idea: get people to teach for free. The first time I saw this news on Facebook I wouldn't have believed it, except that the source was impeccable. According to the online edition of The California Aggie, freshman seminar instructors all received a letter asking them whether they would be willing to forgo the small sum they are paid for this work, $1500-2000 that is normally deposited in their research accounts. "Though Turner could not predict how much money the salary reduction would save," staff writer Lauren Steussy reports, "she stated that approximately 25 instructors agreed to forgo or reduce their stipend."

Other people are outraged, but Turner is undeterred. "When we were brain storming about all of the ways of dealing, I wondered if there were more faculty who would [forgo the stipend] if they were just given the opportunity," Turner said. "People had just done it before. So [McConnell] and I sent a letter saying that in the past, some people have declined these stipends. This is decoupled from whether or not we accept their course." Other Facebook gossip reports that on some UC campuses there are workshops being organized by Human Resources folk to cheer people up about their "furlough days" (pay cuts) by explaining that the free time will allow them to make expansive life choices with this gift that they have been graciously granted by the State of California.

Next week, Turner might want to write a bunch of faculty to ask how they feel about signing up for life insurance policies that stipulate double indemnity in case their death results from being pushed out of a train caboose. Or she might want to find out how many faculty would be interested in taking more furlough time and using it to explore the possibility of becoming sex workers in brothels owned and operated by the provost's office. If you can get 25 instructors to agree not to be paid for their work, anything is possible I suppose. But there is a lot of this going around. On my own campus, we are being offered the opportunity to teach an extra course and/or teach an eight week summer session for adjunct wages to help Zenith close its own budget gap. Compared to the report above, this seems positively liberal, I suppose, as does the fact that our salaries have been indefinitely frozen rather than cut. But no one raises what seems obvious to this Radical: that this pedagogical equivalent to a bake sale would, in effect, be a charitable donation to our employer -- minus the tax write-off -- since full time ladder faculty are paid a great deal more to teach their other regularly scheduled classes.

But there is a larger question at stake about the budget cutting measures that are starting to surface around the country: education is, and always has been, the equivalent of a loss leader at the department store. It's something the United States has to be willing to not make a profit on -- in fact, to accept large losses on -- in order to create generations of young workers, artists, politicians and technicians who are the nation's capital. Our state and federal governments have nickel and dimed higher education for so long that what remains makes no structural sense anymore, and it's no wonder that people do stupid, offensive things to make the cuts demanded of them. Is having the liberal arts taught to freshmen by volunteers what passes for a plan to re-imagine universities to meet the challenges -- economic and educational -- of the twenty-first century? Is the idea that nothing has to change about our values except to ratchet up the practice institutions have long adopted towards adjunct faculty and begin working full-time faculty as hard as they can be worked for as little money as they can be paid? Will we wax enthusiastic about new forms of noblesse oblige, in which some faculty, such as UC's Subhash Risbud, a professor of chemical engineering and material science, who has so much research money available that he is happy to teach a seminar in "his passion" (read: hobby) "of classical Indian music" for free? Are we not concerned that there are actually scholars of Indian music who might be employed to teach this field? For all we know the other twenty-four faculty who gave up their stipends are as blessed as Professor Risbud, but is this also a sacrifice expected of, say, the Chaucer scholar who intended to use that small sum to finance a research trip to England and has no other way of obtaining that money?

What is more appalling is that none of the stories that are beginning to seep out of higher education suggest that any of the measures being taken are temporary, nor is there a broader discussion about what the conditions might be that would return university teaching and scholarship to some semblance of normalcy.

More Annals of the Great Depression: Why We Are All Californians

Non-academics probably don't know that this article by Judith Butler about the September 24 protests at UC-Berkeley (thanks to Facebook, Twitter and a cross-post at Bully Bloggers) is starting to go viral. If you haven't read Butler's piece because you dread academic writing, have no fear. It is a lucid and forceful explication, by a faculty leader in this movement, about what is at stake when public education becomes a privilege, not a right.

One item of significance, in my view, is that this article was published in a British newspaper, not in the New York Times or the Washington Post. On the one hand, I want to say, what is that about? On the other hand, sadly, I know what that is about. For Americans, education is every man or woman for his or herself. Americans say they value education, but they don't seem to value the thought, planning or expenditures necessary to sustain and fight for the institutions that make an educated society possible. Nor, and I would say the elitism of many academics is partly to blame here, do they care much about extending educational opportunities in the most inclusive way possible.

Hence, it no longer common sense that public universities actually be accessible to the public, nor is there much conversation about what private institutions have at stake in returning to some semblance of accessibility and service to a larger public good. This moment, when our way of life at elite institutions has finally become unsustainable, is a critical time to rethink that and we need to look to what is going on in public colleges and universities to see where common interests lie and common action might be taken. What is occurring in California is drastic. As Butler notes, one component of the budget shortfall forced on the UC systems has been cutting programs, courses and faculty (East Asian languages and Arabic have been part of the damage -- now that's a good response to our changing world!) Another has been cutting lecturers and replacing faculty who have left the university. A third has been tuition hikes of 40%.

But some version of this scenario is occurring everywhere.

As culprits, Butler specifically cites a bloated administration, huge budgets for intercollegiate athletics, and, most importantly, a dysfunctional state government in Sacramento. Building on Butler's analysis, however, I would add that there is something else at stake too. This crisis has been a long time coming, since the 1980s at least, when federal and state governments began to pull public resources from educational institutions, attack academia as a bastion of out-of-touch left wingery. Policies like tenure, which were designed to stabilize faculty and nurture research, were condemned as economically inflexible, and colleges and universities of all kinds began to run curricula on adjunct labor as a matter of de facto policy. Defunding of higher education -- based on conservative ideologies designed to starve the state and re-shape public institutions on a free market model -- resulted in steadily raised tuition and the expectation that students and their families would bear the burden of those tuition increases by taking out loans. In many cases, we now discover, that money came out of refinancing homes in an inflated real estate market, something parents were required to do as a condition for grants and financial aid. I have recently heard from several faculty in the first decade of their careers that they expect to be paying back loans taken out for college as well a for graduate school: hence, the salary freezes and furloughs that are being imposed at campuses across the nation, public and private, are having a disproportionate effect on a generation of scholars who have the least influence on policy and the leanest household budgets already.

And of course, there have been much broader effects of shifting the burden of paying for higher education onto students. Many years ago, I recall sitting in a meeting with an administrator responsible for setting fiscal policy who argued that asking students to take out tens of thousands of dollars for a Zenith education was not wrong because it was "an investment." He compared that investment to a mortgage, good debt as opposed to bad debt.

Well it's certainly a better debt than spending $30,000 on shoes. But young people paying back such loans are not buying houses either -- oops! I forgot! They were buying houses, with no money down and interest only payments on a thirty- year ARM.

But I digress. I have a much larger point to make here, which is that academics need to start paying attention to the whole picture. I would like to hear that happy "pop" all over the country, as we pull our heads out of where they have been and realize that this isn't just about the library cuts, it isn't just about the salaries, it isn't just about the standards movement and the demise of anything that might look like progressive education, it isn't about the job market. It's about the whole system and how it works. Here, from my point of view, are four basic issues:

The fate of each form of education is inextricably linked to the fate of its apparent opposite: public schools are linked to private schools, religious schools to secular ones; four-years to community colleges; elite to non-elite. Faculty and administrators need to start responding to that reality and acting collectively with their regional counterparts to make demands on state and local governments to restore cuts in higher education that have been made over the course of decades. Why are we having such trouble staunching the bleeding in the current economic crisis? In part it is because we have hit the limits of what privatization of education, and funding institutions on the backs of private debt rather than public appropriations, can accomplish. A fundamental reorganization of fiscal priorities at the level of government must ensue: defunding of war, of prison, and the elimination of tax incentives for corporations is a place to begin. Faculty and administrations everywhere are currently engaged in a contest as to which stone they are going to try to squeeze blood from next, and that isn't how this problem will be fixed. We need a fresh infusion of cash that takes us back to pre-1980 levels, adjusted for inflation.

Faculty and administrators need to stop arguing with each other and begin fighting the state for the quality education Americans deserve. If there is any lesson to the current crisis it is this: funding higher ed on the backs of students and through private endowments is unstable and unsupportable over the long term. Imagine if a fraction of the funds that have been made available to the military, to the financial industry and to the auto industry were made regularly available to education. And yet, where exactly do we think our next generation of military officers, government workers and foreign policy planners; our bankers and finance executives; our tech workers, teachers, mortgage brokers and businessmen are supposed to come from?

Faculty and administrators need to organize themselves, not just for collective self-interest, but for the no-interest student loans and federal programs that offer tuition in exchange for public service; they need to fight against budget-sucking, government-mandated evaluation instruments that pour education dollars into the pockets of private consultants and contractors; they need to fight for government subsidies for full employment in higher ed that can given the current army of adjunct faculty full salaries and job security (and give us all small classes and manageable course loads.) In other words, when we fight for ourselves we need to do so in ways that are in solidarity with the interests of our students. We need to fight for increased funding for the most accessible form of higher education there is, community colleges, and we need to fight for government programs that help students who have achieved an Associates Degree go on to the most competitive four-year school they can get into. We need to talk to students about why our struggles are their struggles, and vice versa, we need to enlist students in our struggles, and we need to organize. Now.

College and university presidents need to make some kind of collective statement as to what constitutes reasonable expenditures, and the first thing to go should be expenditures aimed at marketing the university. Educational institutions should stand or fall on the quality of the education they offer, period: not the beauty of their dorms, not the national standing of their athletic teams or the latest redesign of their Helly Hanson college gear. As academic programs go under the knife and loan burdens escalate, we are told that vast expenditures on D-I sports are necessary. And yet a fraction of the athletes who play any college sport will become professionals in any capacity, while the expectation is that virtually all science majors will go on to have a science related job. Most scholar-athletes would benefit just as much from a less professionally packaged program: one proof of this is that two Zenith alumni are current NFL coaches. Athletic programs should stand or fall on the quality of the scholar-athlete they produce, not television contracts, Bowl appearances or the glitter of the new stadiums they can persuade politicians and alumni to build. And the burden should not just be on athletics: every time a new student center or dormitory is built, an institution automatically increases its maintenance budget. Often this budget is met by forcing students to live and eat on campus, when historically students have devoted what dollars they had to tuition and books by living collectively off campus.

We need to take an honest look at what gives us prestige and why, and stop devoting dollars to glitzy budget items that make schools into pop cultural phenomena. If alumni and politicians don't understand why a new football stadium has nothing to do with education, we need to stop being such snobs and take it upon ourselves to explain to them why that is.

Colleges and universities must stop competing with each other and begin coordinating themselves by region, and in some cases, nationally. I can't think of a single reason why the private and religious institutions in the state of Connecticut do not band together to form a regional health care cooperative that could bargain more effectively with our insurance companies. If there is a law against it, we should work to change it. Speaking to a recent budget dilemma showcased on Tenured Radical, I cannot think why there should not be a national tuition exchange which every institution can join. This cooperative venture would ensure that all their employees, from janitorial staff to occupants of distinguished chairs, can educate their families at a reasonable fee adjusted to their salary level and at the best and most appropriate school for each prospective student.

Most important, and this will be the hardest thing for some of us to abandon, we must all give up the notion that the prestige attached to some of us entitles us to greater consideration. This is perhaps the greatest lesson of the protests in the California system which, a system that for almost a century has dedicated itself to lifting up every citizen who was willing to study hard and dedicate him or herself to learning.

That is the mission, my friends: that is what we are here for. When we organize only on behalf of our own salary, benefits and research accounts, institution by lonely institution, we are missing the big picture. But if we get the big picture, and are willing to work across the class and interest lines that currently divide us, the rest will come.

We are all Californians now.

More Annals of the Great Depression: What Divides Us And Why

At Zenith University, like everywhere else, there are budget cuts. There were cuts last year; there will be more cuts this year; one imagines there will perhaps be more cuts next year. Everyone thinks of us as a rich little school, and compared to some we are: compared to many schools with which we are associated (Amherst, Williams) we are not. What compounds the problem (and I won't bore you with the details) is that up until about a decade ago, the combination of poor investing, insufficient fund-raising and living beyond our means meant that not only did Zenith's endowment not grow, it shrank dramatically from the bountiful era of owning My Weekly Reader, a period which shaped the expectations and thinking of several generations of faculty still working at the university. Assertions that we are very short of cash are met with varying levels of disbelief, even though we all also know that it is true.

To make a long story short (and not be revealing in ways that will make me even more unpopular at Zenith today than I was yesterday) budget talk reveals many things about the normative assumptions of one's organization. Chief among the assumptions under discussion in mine yesterday was that the "normal" Zenith employee has, or wants, children; and that the childless among us benefit in countless ways from their colleagues' desire to have and raise children. Another is the extent to which many of my colleagues believe, despite reassurances to the contrary and the ongoing scrutiny of the budget process by a committee of trustworthy people we elected, that any attempt to curtail faculty benefits and privileges (even those unequally distributed, as I will discuss below) is part of an ongoing conspiracy by the administration to proletarianize the faculty. This conspiracy has been in the works for decades, so its proponents believe, and is now being activated by the global financial crisis, which will allow the Zenith administration to do what they have wanted to do all along: strip us of every last right and privilege.

Loud protests that there is "fat" elsewhere that can be cut rend the land. No one who has made this claim has been specific as to where such cuts might be usefully made, or why, other than the fact that they do not represent direct faculty interests - from what I understand, budgets like financial aid, University Relations and student services are where "fat" can be found. Some colleagues make unproven claims of varying extravagance about how they only came to Zenith in the first place because of the benefit currently under discussion, or that they have turned down attractive offers from other, unnamed, institutions only because of promised benefits that Zenith now threatens to rescind. Still others assert that it is only the excellent benefits that allow people to take moderate-wage academic jobs in the first place, and that benefits cuts will send high quality potential scholars into other fields.

This, of course, ignores the fact that some academics (economists, scientists) are paid dramatically more than others (historians, literature professors); and that there seem to be, depending on the field in question, between ten and fifty well-qualified people for every position at an American college or university. Maybe I’m wrong; maybe all those people teach adjunct because they love the freedom and hate TIAA-CREF.

Of course only in academia would anyone imagine a set of conversations with a dean as a promise, or as some have claimed, a “contract,” to be kept in perpetuity regardless of the financial circumstances of the institution. Even unions have to negotiate their benefits periodically to reflect a new economic climate. In fact, anyone who has had their eyes open lately knows that, except for not getting a raise this year, the faculty has been the last place Zenith has targeted for actual cuts. All the administrative departments are letting people go and not replacing them, and Zenith administrators did receive what amounted to a salary cut last year when their annual performance bonuses were canceled. Offices like Admissions, for example, are doing more with less, processing more paperwork (financial aid requests have grown, as have applications to Zenith) with fewer staff.

So imagine my surprise when, in response to what has been framed as a temporary scaling back in Zenith's tuition benefit (in which the University proposes that it will continue to grow, probably not at the rate tuitions will increase, but constituting tens of thousands of dollars per dependent child) created a storm of unreasoning protest. Of all the benefits we have, this group of faculty declared, this was the one that could not be tampered with. Imagine my further surprise when, in response to a number of us who have no access to this benefit suggesting that we could support a cut in the tuition benefit equal to all other cuts being made, we were roundly scolded for being ignorant, uncaring, unfeeling and deluded.

This is a more civilized critique than those who questioned child-supremacy used to get: the child-free, regardless of why they were in that position, were until recently routinely spoken of as narcissistic, selfish, or child hating. Now we are just patronized because of our failure to understand why a continuing, although smaller, increase in a benefit we do not receive is something we should be willing to fight for while our own paychecks are frozen and our health care costs rise. That we are also appalled, distressed, and alienated at how quickly the child supremacists are willing to throw us under the bus to preserve a large benefit that we do not share; or that our primary human attachments might be to ourselves, or to members of a non-hetero/homonormative social formation, many of them find naive and morally questionable.

I would like to point out that the loose coalition of the willing that does not consider this cut unthinkable is made up of gay people and straight people; the coupled and the uncoupled; the married and the unmarried; those who have dependent (or formerly dependent) children and those who do not. I mention this because one of the first things people make sure to tell me in particular is that they are not homophobic (you know what? If you feel you have to say this, you are homophobic. I didn't bring it up, you did.) Several of the kinder scolds suggested that we who were not with the program would understand this issue better if we actually had children and better understood the sacred bond between parent and child. The most ignorant argued that the childless were not excluded from this benefit, and could access it any time we liked by having, adopting or inheriting children. Of all the unspoken assumptions, perhaps the one best masking itself as intellectual common sense was that we who are childless at Zenith do have a moral and ethical commitment to our colleagues' children, because it is these children who, as adult workers, will earn the professional wages to pay for our government benefits in retirement.

In other words, because I haven't had children, regardless of how much I have paid into Social Security over the years, I will become a welfare queen in old age. And as I sign my government checks over to the BMW dealership and the grog shop, it will not be just any children who support me in the style to which I am now accustomed, but the children of my Zenith colleagues. That I might have ethical obligations to children who are dependent on a network of adults for their education is not even worth arguing to these vigorous proponents of the nuclear family, nor that I might specifically wish to sponge off them in the future, rather than trust that my colleagues' children aren't going to use their fancy liberal arts educations to become itinerant folk singers. That this is a benefit that ought to be extended as part of an equal compensation package granted to every worker for whatever educational purpose s/he chooses (which might require capping the benefit at a certain amount per worker, or per beneficiary) is even more unthinkable to many of those who have Gone Nuclear even though, to date, two of my colleagues who are, I think, heterosexual, have articulated this position. My point is, either we have all earned it, or we all haven't earned it. Pick one, and that's where we can start the process of coming to consensus about this little plum in the budget.

No, they respond: nothing will do but an unlimited benefit reserved exclusively for the children of Zenith.

This ugly, divisive incident has reinforced my belief that one of the major, under-examined flaws of New Deal liberalism has been the extent to which it left intact the assumption that our fate, as human beings, should remain tied to so-called traditional notions of the family and the workplace. This was not, of course, an entirely unexamined assumption. One of the most graphic examples of how this played out was Social Security. Labor historian Alice Kessler-Harris's In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in Twentieth Century America (2001) has documented the lengths to which framers of the original legislation passed on August 15, 1935 went to limit women's secondary access to funds that were the legal entitlement of a male breadwinner. Kessler-Harris and Linda Gordon, among others, have written about the systematic exclusion of workers, primarily of color, who were specifically written out of Social Security legislation because they were employed in seasonal, at will, or non-organized workplaces.

Although legally these exclusions no longer exist, in fact, they do. Because one’s social security benefits are paid according to the amount and duration of what a worker has paid in, people who enter the workplace late, or work sporadically (often women) have fewer benefits. Because their work takes place in a home or a workplace that is lightly scrutinized by the authorities (a farm, a sweatshop) the immigrants and people of color who do what amounts to day labor often do not have social security contributions made in their names. And we who are prevented from marrying our partners and creating federally recognized families do not inherit a spouse's Social Security benefits, nor can we designate them to anyone who is not a dependent child.

An even knottier issue, from my perspective, is the extent to which New Deal social legislation, and reforms associated with post-war prosperity and the rise of workplace benefits, depended on the private sector to support middle-class expectations of comfort and security. From what I know about the New Deal state, this dependence had two broad origins. The first was ideological: southern Democrats vigorously resisted any shift of power and authority to the federal government that might eventually be used to overturn racial subordination. A more national political problem for the Roosevelt administration was the danger of totalitarianism that was becoming prominent in Europe and Asia in the 1930s, and the fear that New Deal initiatives would be perceived as socialist or fascist.

What has been less written about is the extent to which the New Deal state simply did not have the capacity to run a large social welfare system and turned to Fordism as a solution. An early prototype of national welfare, the Civil War pension system, was notorious for its inefficiencies and corruption, and because it only extended benefits to Union veterans, was never meant to be comprehensive or permanent. By the time the American state did prove itself capable of creating a fully functional national bureaucracy capable of large-scale taxation and disbursement during World War II, the ideological moment for the creation of a social welfare system had both passed and never arrived. I say passed, because the crisis of the Great Depression was finally ended by putting the nation on a war footing for the rest of the century, thus making prosperity the "norm" and effectively re-stigmatizing the poor. I imagine the ideological moment as never having arrived because, as Kessler-Harris and Gordon point out, the notion that what we now call “benefits” were permanently sutured to the notion that the normal condition of individuals was to belong to a patriarchal family living off a family wage that freed women to be full-time mothers and children to be full-time students. Furthermore, Cold War heterosexual parenting was articulated as service to the state, supported by an elaborate series of tax deductions, workplace benefits and enhanced public education designed to help (white) families become and remain middle-class. "Benefits" are part of that structure, even though we have come to think of them as something we are owed, separate from salary, because we so depend on them to remain middle class. They operate in part as an enticement when the labor market is competitive (not a stage of history we are in right now), and they are a way of shielding what are essentially salary bonuses from the Internal Revenue Service.

Whether the United States, as a cultural, political or economic formation, actually values children is debatable. But what remains relevant from my point of view is that little that has changed over the past several decades to alter the basic assumption among many liberals that workers who are married and/or have children actually deserve more benefits from their employer. Gays and lesbians are now included in this ideology because we are no longer always prevented from marrying and having children (even though these are much more difficult hurdles than the vast majority of heterosexual people understand.) I think this is interesting, because certainly at Zenith, years ago when many of us questioned why unmarried workers were not entitled to health insurance for their domestic partners, the very same people would shrug their shoulders and say some version of, "That's the way of the world, I guess," but they also refused the notion that unmarried workers were not being equally compensated. Now that we (the unmarried) actually have such benefits, they forget that they never supported them, or that many of them said openly that the flood of claims from the unmarried would overwhelm the system, causing a reduction in everybody's benefits.

And this is what they believe, but will not say, about the tuition benefit. They believe that if it is extended to every employee, there will not be enough left for them. All the rest of it is just smoke, mirrors and ideology my friends. But it is also pretty insulting, because it expands the dictates of the nuclear family to all of us who, frankly, do not benefit from it at all. Most important, it avoids the main point: the major systems that have made this country one of the most prosperous in the world have always been discriminatory. Now that they are in crisis, this is glaringly obvious, and falling back on families and family wage models to fix that crisis is mere tinkering with a system that was designed to fail in the first place.

Not Just Your Average Kibitzing Radical: Ways To Be In Touch With The Struggle At The University of California

"As California goes, so goes the nation," writes my correspondent Eileen Boris from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where a lot of the activism seems to be taking place. So get involved! Public education matters.

So if you can tear yourself away from the Sotomayor hearings, here are some links she sent me. The first is a petition to suspend the current budget-cutting strategy (which seems to be of the slash-and-burn variety) until a more participatory planning process can be organized. You will be asked to identify your relationship to the university; I wrote "friend of the University of California," and it accepted that designation.

For more on what organizers are currently up to, click here, and to get information about the California Board of Regents, click here.

And while you are at it -- find out what's being cut in your state. Reports submitted to Tenured Radical at hte email address in my profile will be published. If you wish to publish pseudonymously, you need to tell me who you are, but I'll keep it confidential.

"Sincerely Yours, The Department Of Miserable Bastards"

"The partly filled lifeboat standing by about 100 yards away never came back. Why on Earth they never came back is a mystery. How could any human being fail to heed those cries?" Jack B. Thayer, a survivor of RMS Titanic, April, 1912.

Thanks to my colleague Margaret Soltan at University Diaries, I have acquired a link to this letter. It is signed by Andrew Scull, Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Sociology Department at the University of California, San Diego and twenty-two of his fellow chairs, including John Marino, the chair of history. English, in my experience often the home of gentler folk, is not a signatory. I don't see any of the chairs of interdisciplinary programs like Gender Studies or Ethnic Studies either. So that tells you something right there.

Read the letter for yourself and see what you think. True, higher education in California is imperiled by the state budget crisis, and it is a shame. It is a shame because this has been coming for years, as California has built spectacular prisons at great cost to one of the finest public education systems in the nation, if not the world. It is a shame because all bills finally come due, and the mean people of California would rather give up education than incarceration, testing, hunting down undocumented workers, and badgering gay people. It has been coming because the selfish and unrealistic people of California and the even more unrealistic politicians that they have elected have refused, over and over, to raise taxes to appropriate levels to simultaneously maintain their educational system and police the hell out of their state. I have had great sympathy for my colleagues who work all over the California system in recent weeks because of the cuts that were inevitable, and are now bound to hurt even people with good salaries. Focused almost entirely on retaining star faculty and their research grants, the letter fails to mention that many thousands of non-faculty are simply on the street now: as I understand it, Santa Cruz let go over 1000 administrative staff last month. I am, in fact, deeply concerned about those friends wooed to California schools in recent years with large salaries and named chairs that they expected to be the capstone of distinguished careers. Such people may really be on the ledge financially right now (particularly in places like San Diego) with expensive, heavily mortgaged real estate -- the resale market for which has crashed -- that they still have to pay for with significantly lower salaries.

That said, what are the signatories of this letter concerned about? Why their reputations! And what do they propose as a remedy for a collapsing university in this drastic economic and political crisis? Not taxes. Not decarceration, or an end to the billions spent every year testing students at all levels in California. No. These department chairs suggest, not a reset to the horrendous values that are finally bringing them out of their labs and onto their knees, but an intensification of those values. More elitism! More exclusion! More me, me, me! This includes the following suggestions for remedying the University of California's budget problems.

Enrolling 500 more out-of-state students every year for the next four years to generate 44 million dollars. In other words, privatize further. Abandon the mission to educate the citizens of California, in favor of educating rich (white?) full-payers who want to go to college near the beach. Two problems here: one is that before four years is up, as I understand it, by getting a new drivers license and registering to vote, these students become in-state students and qualify for the lower tuition. Another issue: who is going to teach these students? Certainly not the signatories of the letter or their distinguished colleagues. Oh - I forgot! I'm such a ninny. Graduate students! Adjuncts!

That the University of California make its commitment to excellence more graphic by emphasizing that its research is more or less funded by corporate America and the Department of Defense. As Scull explains, "the campus could also compile a list of 5‐10 pieces of faculty research in the past decade that have transformed our knowledge and improved human welfare, and supplement that with a similar list of spin‐off corporations and technologies (Qualcomm obviously prominent among them) that have transformed the economy of the region and the state. Again, these lists must be hammered home over and over again, like an annoying advertisement that enters everyone’s consciousness."

That does sound annoying. And what are specific examples of research that have "improved human welfare"? Funny that Qualcomm sprang to mind immediately, but a specific example related to the public good did not.

And speaking of the commitment to excellence, why should distinguished scholars at the UCSD campus have to take the same pay cut as their less well-paid colleagues in the state system? It seems so unfair, since everyone knows that that UCSD faculty are better, smarter and deserve more than the lesser human beings who teach elsewhere. "Rather than destroying the distinctiveness and excellence at Berkeley, UCLA, and UCSD by hiring temporary lecturers to do most of the teaching (and contribute nothing to original research, nothing to our reputation, nothing to the engine of economic growth a first rate research university represents)," Scull writes, "we propose that you urge the President and Regents to acknowledge that UCSC, UCR, and UC Merced are in substantial measure teaching institutions (with some exceptions – programs that have genuinely achieved national and international excellence and thus deserve separate treatment), whose funding levels and budgets should be reorganized to match that reality."

To put it in plain English for those of you who do not teach at a prestigious flagship, some people (you, for example) suck, other people (they) don't; hence, it can be determined some faculty have value and others do not. From this we can derive that some faculty are endlessly exploitable and/or can be discarded without any real harm coming to anyone important, such as students.

You are so right, Professor Scull, and I think you should just march right up to Angela Davis and her HisCon friends and tell them that to their faces. The one bright spot in this budget crisis, it seems, is that we can take the gloves off and be honest with each other about how we really feel. But I do want to say -- that was one heck of a run-on sentence, and before you row away in your little lifeboat, leaving the rest of the system to paddle around on whatever floats, you might want to get the Chair of the English Department on board.

Annals of the Second Great Depression: Looking On The Bright Side

It's time to sing the end-of-spring-vacation-blues. What would normally be a happy day -- Friday, with two long weekend days ahead -- is a sad day, with only two days left before we go back to work. Of course, yours truly will work for exactly two days, and then fly to Seattle for the Organization of American Historians Annual Meeting. The theme this year is "History Without Boundaries:" yeah, baby. Don't fence the Radical in. Historiann and I already have a meet-up planned to further refine our plans to rule the world.

When I return from Seattle it will be April, and April is the cruelest month ("breeding/Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing/Memory and desire, stirring/Dull roots with spring rain.") We never get tired of muttering this to each other at Zenith, in between editing thesis chapters; grading, grading, grading; slogging through the final five weeks of teaching; checking Facebook compulsively; writing annual reports; making sense of the budget; advising students for preregistration; signing endless forms for graduation, going abroad, transferring credit, and activating AP; attending receptions; giving prizes; electing Phi Beta Kappa candidates; doing every piece of faculty business that did not get done the rest of the year; and scraping exhausted students off the sidewalk with a snow shovel.

It makes me want to go back to bed just thinking about it because, you know: I'm knackered this year, more so than usual. I am sick of evaluating other people, and don't want anyone else to evaluate me for a good long time. Between the economic meltdown and doing four searches (and checking Facebook compulsively) I feel that I have done enough work this year. I discovered earlier today that Zenith may feel that I have done enough work for a lifetime. I was just invited to a panel discussion on campus entitled "The Experience of Retirement." To be fair, I think everyone who is tenured was invited. Initially I thought the notice was a little strange, since I am only fifty. But my guess is that they are using me and others like me as cover so that colleagues over 65 can't bring a lawsuit to say that they are being harassed into retiring. For my money, a panel discussion is a more subtle message than, say, leaving a dead fish in your mailbox. Now that's harassment. That is what I will say if called to testify, at any rate.

But there are bright spots: because we have no money, there will actually be less work to do, starting now. We won't be hiring visitors or adjuncts, which takes an enormous amount of effort, and lasts well into May or June. We won't be submitting new line requests, as there aren't any new lines -- or at least, so few, it's hardly worth while to compete for them. We won't spend part of the summer getting ready to search, and -- best of all -- we who are chairs won't have to worry about recommending our colleagues for merit in June, because we are not getting any raises. And we chairs also won't have to spend all of July zig-zagging from bush to bush on our way to the library, trying to hide from the people who -- because we are asked to rank our colleagues -- didn't get very nice raises.

(Not So) New President and his staff have, to date, done a great job of keeping up morale at Zenith in the midst of all this financial trouble, but here's what would be even better. Instead of money, give us back some time. For example, since we aren't getting any raises, why not cancel annual reports -- the medium by which raises are determined? Annual reports take forever to write -- that is, if you have actually done anything. And it always feels like a kind of double-jeopardy. You have spent all year working your fanny off,and then you have to spend a day writing it up and updating your vita. Then, if you are a chair, you have to spend another day at least badgering your colleagues to get their annual reports in, and then writing yet another report about what a fine bunch everyone in your department or program are.

Here are a couple other ideas to give time back that won't cost a dime.

Kill a faculty committee. At Zenith, we could start with the Faculty Committee on Rights and Responsibilities which used to serve as a venue to file grievances against members of the faculty, but rarely does anymore. A few years ago, from what I understand, our university counsel took a look at it and its procedures and had a rather large bird. The faculty could agree not to harass each other in return for the administration agreeing not to appoint or convene the committee.

Stop asking for letters of recommendation for study abroad programs. These are a screaming waste of time. I have never known a student to be turned down from such a program. Even when you forget to send in the recommendation, they get in. Truth.

Make the freshman year credit-fail. This one's tricky, but stay with me. There are roughly 800 first year students at Zenith: multiply by four courses and two semesters, that's *6400* final grades given in the first year alone. Then multiply by the roughly 4 pieces of work given in each course, and that's 25,600 grades that have to be decided! And since at least 20% of those grades will be below the grade of A-, that's at least 5,120 incidents of upset students, at least half of whom (2,560) will want to see their professors for at least 15 minutes per incident to explain that they have never received such a grade before. Now you see where I'm going, don't you? Think how much better it would be for the students not to stress out about grades their first year, and how much better for we, the faculty people not to have those stupid conversations about grades and spend our time teaching (or checking our Facebooks) instead. If every party, students and faculty, is happier at the end of the year, we could get rid of grades for the other three years as well.

What are your ideas, readers?

Extra, Extra -- Read All About It: Tenured Radical And Rupert Murdoch Agree On Something

I saw this when I stopped into the CVS a few minutes ago, and thought I would put it up for those of you who have the good luck to live outside the range of a Murdoch tabloid. Sometimes the New York Post hits it right on the head don't they? This ranks right up there with the Daily News headline after Gerald Ford declared in 1975 that he would veto any "federal bailout" dedicated to keeping New York City from going into bankruptcy: "Ford To City: Drop Dead."

A Lesson From Minnesota Fats: Bernie Madoff Hustled the Hustlers, But Are They Victims?

I will conclude my endless blithering about my lost and recovered iPhone with the following life lesson. As we were cruising down the highway, I was squeaking through my tears, having nothing else to say about what an idiot I had been to drop this cherished item in a parking lot, "It's not fair. It's not fair. It's just not fair." My companion, in an effort to comfort me said, "I'll buy you a new iPhone." And I said, "No,no,no. That's not the point." Fast forward to a conversation on the airplane home from vacation, surrounded by pink-skinned, peeling northerners in Mickey Mouse gear. My companion asked me what I meant when I said that "it wasn't fair." I explained: knowing that an iPhone was a huge luxury in times like these, I had taken all steps to be prudent about the purchase. I had calculated the increased monthly charges, and I had paid cash (or the debit card equivalent thereof) for the damn thing. It was cash I had saved for that purpose over a period of several months and that existed over and above the money I normally budget, not just to pay regular household bills, and to put in my savings account, but for upcoming things that now count as luxuries: my rowing club membership, for example, or grooming the dog. "But despite all that," I explained, the iPhone "was just gone. For no reason. As if I had never had it in the first place. It wasn't fair."

It was only later, writing this post, that I was able to connect my horror and rage at my own stupidity to that stomach-churning scene in The Hustler (Robert Rossen, 1961), where Minnesota Fats draws "Fast Eddie" Felson so deep into his hustle that Felson loses all caution -- and then Fats takes him apart, cue stroke by cue stroke, leaving Felson collapsed and broke.

So imagine my surprise when I ended my week long news fast this morning and stumbled on this article about responses to Bernie Madoff's guilty plea by those caught up in his scheme, in the Business section of The New York Times. As Joe Nocera writes, the victims in this case were also accomplices to their own demise for not having inquired as to how they were receiving such out-of-scale profits for their investments. In doing so, they disregarded some basic investing guidelines that -- if your parents didn't teach you -- reading a simple investment how-to book (or the business pages of any newspaper) would. These rules include:

Don't put all your money in one fund;

If the investment manager can't explain what s/he is doing to grow your money or return profits in language you can understand, you should not invest; and

If the profits you are receiving seem to good to be true, they probably are.

The institutions and individuals who invested with Madoff disregarded all three of these rules, to their peril, despite obvious "tells" that have been documented everywhere, like quarterly reports printed on a dot matrix printer, and the employment of a single auditor for what was supposed to be a vast and labyrinthine fund. Now, as Nocera writes, many investors insist that it is the government who is primarily at fault, and that they should have access to a "victim's" fund because Madoff ought to have been scrutinized by government regulators early and often. In other words: it's not fair, it's not fair, it's not fair.

Now, I opened with my boring little parable, because I do not think these people should be mocked. Their pain is real, and they have been irreparably harmed. I do think, however, they need to reorganize their view of themselves as victims if, as Nocera tells us, they really think that they ought to be reimbursed by the government for their pain. In fact, they they gambled and lost. All investment, whether it is legally structured or not, is a gamble, as those of us know who have watched our TIAA-CREF fall, fall, fall.

I do hope the Madoff "victims" return to their senses soon. I, for example, fell into a yawning chasm of grief over a far lesser object that could be easily replaced. The idea that my cherished iPhone could simply disappear -- and that it was returning to me far more joy than any material object ought to return in a sane universe, had also never occurred to me, I admit. But when I returned to my right mind, did I think that someone -- the government, perhaps -- should have handed me a new iPhone because I could not resolve my grief and embarrassment over my own foolishness? No. Why? Because I had never bought the damn insurance that would have permitted this outcome: insurance was an act of prudence, one that I rejected, because never in my life have I lost or broken an expensive electronic item. But that was, on my part, a calculated judgement that the future would replicate the past.

What past did many Madoff investors believe would be replicated? Why, that the the government works in the service of the wealthy, and furthermore that the wealthy would protect each other from the inevitable failure of an overinflated bull market. They believed that they were special, and that they always would be. After all, this is what happened in the late 1920's: as any economic history of the Great Crash of 1929 will tell you, wealthy American investors knew there was something wrong far earlier than anyone else did, and began cashing out as early as 1927. That the closed club of the "classes" had, by 1990, come to include elevated members of the "masses" like the Madoffs, did not obviate our "victims'" assumption that they would be cared for by other wealthy, powerful people like themselves. Elie Wiesel echoed earlier interviews when he explained outside the court house: “it was a myth that [Madoff] created around him....that everything was so special, so unique, that it had to be secret. It was like a mystical mythology that nobody could understand.” Mr. Wiesel added: “He gave the impression that maybe 100 people belonged to the club. Now we know thousands of them were cheated by him.” (Quoted in Nocera, 3/14/09)

Many of these people who were in the club refuse to admit to this day that they are not special, only suckers after all. As touch football lingo goes, "suckers walk." But they believe they should be repaid federal taxes that they paid on "profits" that didn't exist (wrong: you cashed the checks and spent the money); and worse, they think the justice to be had here is for the defrauded privileged to be reimbursed by the government rather than accept responsibility for their own foolishness (as the poor who were suckered into bad mortgage deals and credit card debt are supposed to.) It seems to me one of the paradoxes of this historical moment that deregulation was apparently just fine -- regardless of the terrible consequences it had for 95% of the world's population - up until the point at which those who benefited from de-regulation were reaping the consequences and losing stashes of money that were either ill-gotten in this century or in previous ones.

Yes, here's the news: if you are living off of inherited wealth, regardless of what you have done in this generation, the money that supports your gracious living and your philanthropy is 19th century and 20th century blood money. You know what wasn't fair? The Ludlow Massacre, that's what. And chattel slavery. And the murder of indigenous peoples. And every CIA-sponsored coup that delayed democracy so that American corporations could pillage the hemisphere. And that you privatized the entire world, dismantled the social safety net, and sent your children to private school while the public schools were turned over to the testing industry: that's not fair either. And it's not fair that some people don't get to go to college and others get to go to Harvard because their families have always gone to Harvard (or Zenith, or Yale, or Stanford or (add the name of your favorite elite university here ___________.)

So I say, Madoff victims, I am sorry for your pain. And now it is time to roll up your sleeves, get to work like the rest of us and learn the lesson that most of the world knows: life isn't fair, and it's the people who learn to take care of themselves, who accept their losses and improve on them, and who build an ethical community around them who survive such withering blows. Along with the three basic rules for investing, let me offer in closing the three basic rules for how we might re-educate ourselves as a society, starting at the top and working down, as we leave the Age of Madoff behind.

Not everyone who has suffered something terrible is a "victim," nor should we be living in a Manichean world where fault is punished and innocence rewarded. The label of "victim" is over-used, in my view, and needs to be actively re-defined. "Victim" now implies that the person who has suffered The Terrible Thing has no culpability; the obverse of this is that if the person who has suffered can be proven to have made a fatal decision, wittingly or unwittingly, s/he can't be a "victim," and is therefore entitled to no consideration or sympathy. Ergo, unmarried mothers deserve no help from the government; women living off unearned income who lose it to a well-organized scam should be reimbursed by the government so that they can resume their former lifestyle. Instead, we need to realize, as a society, that all people suffer from a complex mixture of flaw, fate and fault some of which the government can correct and most of which it can't. We have good examples of how whole societies have benefitted from putting a floor under poverty, acting on the right to health care, housing, nutritous food and education. It is much harder to imagine how a society benefits from preserving the right to plastic surgery, the Hamptons, Whole Foods and Deerfield Academy.

Don't whine. You were rich. Now you are not. Pull up your socks and go on.

If you are making vast profits without working for them, and living as though that money will be there forever, you are gambling. And people who gamble sometimes lose. That doesn't make it wrong to gamble: I say this as someone who is not only in the stock market, but wagers on horses for sport, and often profit. But it does make it perilous to gamble with your food money or your mortgage, very few people make a living at gambling, and it is the gamblers who allow themselves to be so gulled by out sized winnings that they can't leave the table who become the mark.

Lifeboat: A Conversation About The Incredible Shrinking Budget

Yesterday we had a big meeting at Zenith: more members of the faculty attended than at any previous meeting I can recall, except for one about ten years ago when our last newly hired president was introduced. The Radical and several co-conspirators used this unusual quorum to kill a major university committee to which they had been elected. It was a hideous, time-waster of a major committee, one that received institutional problems that no one wanted to do anything about, made recommendations after many circular and ill-informed debates, and saw those recommendations sent to The File That Has No Name by the administrator who had been appointed the boss of us. In retaliation -- I mean, response -- to this institutional travesty, we secretly devoted our energy, not to issues that were dumped on our doorstep, but to creating a rationale and a strategy for killing the committee. The problem was gaining not just a quorum, but a two-thirds majority necessary for altering the Faculty Handbook. And then voila! A new president was hired and everyone, we imagined, would come to the introductory meeting to get a glimpse of him. So we put our motion on the agenda, and here was the beauty of the whole thing. Because the people who came were people who are too apathetic to ever come to meetings, but made an exception for that one, they were instantly persuaded that we the committee shouldn't have go to meetings either. They voted resoundingly in favor of our motion before a somewhat dumbfounded set of administrative officers who discovered unexpectedly that they were not the boss of us. No sirree.

What was on the table yesterday was something different: how Zenith will close a yawning budget gap that is conservatively predicted at $15 million: read about our problems here. They probably aren't so different from your problems, right? Except if you teach at a public university or a community college your problems are worse.

I won't go into what was said at the meeting, as it is against my blogger ethic. But one of the things I would like to explore in future posts is the nature of community, and scholars' capacity for empathetic connection -- or lack thereof -- to other types of workers in and beyond our workplace. This becomes particularly apparent at a meeting like yesterday's, when it became clear how very tuition driven Zenith is (I have no idea how this compares to other institutions our size); how volatile we can expect our financial aid budget to be in the next few years (or maybe even starting tomorrow); how much the recession may drive other costs up (or down, in the case of fuel, for example); what the long term costs of certain kinds of temporary disinvestment are (Library, physical plant); and how few options a college has to generate immediate, extra cash to cover its expenses, assuming there is anyone to buy what we would offer.

That I can make this list in such a cogent way is some testimony to the presentation we saw yesterday, which was, I would say impressive and reassuring, to the extent that it addresses my basic problem: I don't want to run the university. I want to know that the people in charge are thoughtful, competent and doing the best they know how to do. But of course, what makes the future very anxious for me and many of my colleagues (in varying degrees) is what I did not put on the list: faculty salaries. And while this has not been decided, it looks like salaries will be frozen for next year. Where else do you get $2.3 million? Everybody pitch in and sell a kidney?

Needless to say a projection that salaries may flatline for an indefinite period produces resentment, fear and rage. So in the remainder of this post, I would like to toss out a couple questions that are worth asking yourself as you process your own resentment about your flat salary projection.

Are you being asked to give back salary? And do you live more or less in debt, assuming that there will always be more money? There is no rule anywhere that prevents academics from being asked to take a salary cut. Therefore, you might consider being relieved that you will have the same salary this year as next: whether it will be worth the same amount of money or not is not the question. No one should assume they will always make more money forever. It is this philosophy, writ large, that has brought us to this pass: salaries will always rise, home prices will always go up, endless amounts of debt can be covered (almost) by next year's raise/bonus, increasing the pool of homeowners, by whatever means, is always better. You see what I mean? Rethink this, not just because you might want to lower your blood pressure, but because your life decisions and future happiness shouldn't always be pinned to having a salary that barely matches your expenditures. While you are at it, start watching Suze Orman on television.

I am getting tenure/promoted this year -- what about that big raise I was supposed to get? Well, I think they should find money in the budget to pay this out, frankly, because it will compress salaries in the middle ranks even more than they are compressed already. But don't forget what you will get for tenure -- a job for life. For life. That's more than the part-time clerical they just let go over there has.

In what way do you, really, in your heart, believe that faculty are the most important people in the institution and that everyone else is dispensable? Examine this, OK? Because it is not just that there are a range of people who directly support your professional existence (IT, librarians, more administrative assistants and secretaries than you know about, deans, blah, blah, blah) but actually, it is only rank snobbery that makes you think your work is inherently better than theirs. You need to know this about yourself and work on it.

Do you pay any attention to the general health of the institution, or how money is being misspent, except when your own self-interest is threatened? When was the last time you took an interest in whether the faculty lines authorized really addressed student demand and were worth committing funds to? Or whether you should stop copying the articles assigned to your seminar on the department machine only because you are too lazy to learn how to put them up on line? Or whether it is really ethical to process all of your pleasure reading through your research account? And furthermore -- that dean who you think is one dean too many -- how would you like to deal with the students who are so strung out at the end of the semester that they are endangering their health? Or the bulemia club over at Tau Theta Zeta? That might be a good job for you -- or you -- or you -- and we could save the money next time a dean vacates his or her job.

Isn't letting the administration get away with a salary freeze just lying down and letting them walk all over us? No, keeping your trap shut, repressing your anger at how you are treated, not disagreeing with anyone who might ever vote on your promotion, and never saying or writing anything you believe until you have a tenure letter in your pocket is letting people walk all over you. Agreeing to a salary freeze, when it is explained as part of a well-reasoned plan is sticking out your hand and playing your role as a partner in the enterprise.

The strangest thing I have heard -- and I have heard it from more than one person -- is the narrative of sacrifice, in which a faculty member claims to have chosen university teaching when other, far more lucrative work was possible, but in an act of self-abnegation chose to teach the unwashed masses who seem to cluster regularly at private colleges and universities. Having made this sacrifice, the story goes, no others should be required: nay, this person should receive raises while others near and far, working class and middle class people working in soulless occupations, lose their jobs.

While it is not required of us to be grateful for having jobs as unemployment gallops to new highs, it is worth remembering that life isn't fair. When we are not being rewarded with cash prizes for our accomplishments, it might be a good time to figure out if there are personal rewards other than money that cause you to stay committed to teaching and the production of knowledge. If there are not, I strongly suggest you use the safety of your tenured position to explore another line of work that would make you happy.

If not, my advice is this. Gratitude for your job security isn't required, but it might be seemly. And since this doesn't seem to be widely known, let me just say: being a university teacher is not the moral equivalent of being a priest, a social worker, a member of the Peace Corps, a safe-sex worker or a community activist, in which you have traded affluence to serve others. If you think that is the entire reason why you chose to teach and write you are, frankly, delusional, and suffer from profound status anxiety.

And just think: on that day that you looked at the two lines at Career Planning, one leading to the Graduate Record Exam, and the other leading to an interview with Bear, Stearns, when you followed your heart and became a scholar, the Goddess might have been actually looking out for you.

Don't disappoint her now.

And A Special Little F***k You From Citibank: the Radical Comments on the Current Economic Crisis

One of my responses to the financial meltdown was to cancel a bunch of credit cards. How did I acquire all these credit cards in the first place? Well, in several ways, but most of all because they were offered to me by banks at low (or no) interest. They were offered to me as great opportunities, full of flattering language about how my credit history had caused me to be selected as a Particularly Prestigious Customer. In fact, I was getting them because we sold a house, bought a house, paid off a mortgage, acquired a new (relatively modest) primary mortgage, added a small construction loan, and made our payments punctually. In other words, because financial institutions share so much information, it was clear that the Radical family was spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in the space of about sixteen months. And much as I would like to imagine myself as Particularly Prestigious, I wasn't born under a rock. I was actually being offered these cards in hopes that I would overreach: that I would charge up a bunch of stuff, miss a payment (or not), and end up paying as high as 29% on purchases, accumulated interest, late payment penalties and miscellaneous fees. Which leads me to propose that in all the fuss about subprime mortgage lending, it is the extension of these fraudulent practices to the credit card market that has caused the second great weakness in our economy.

I had only one credit card for years -- the L.L. Bean Bank of America credit card that gave me free shipping --which I liked because, being a butch lesbian, I have a great need to be constantly filling out my wardrobe with flannel shirts, duck boots, jeans with flannel linings, wool socks, and whatnot. And then all of those years of commuting between Big City and Zenith also meant that new sail bags were always a fun holiday gift in the Radical household. Those of you who commute know what I mean: you empty the sail bag when you get home, leave it by the door, and start tossing things in the next day. By the time you are ready to return to the other home, you find your keys, your novel, your wallet and -- voila! Out the door.

That credit card got hammered during our big renovation two years ago (although many points were acquired and subsequently exchanged for new cross-country skis and a splendid bike rack), so -- although I tried to pay the card off every month -- at a certain point living expenses and construction expenses became so confused that I found myself with a sizable balance that was running at about 23%. What to do? Well, sensibly I thought, I acquired three other credit cards that offered me 0% financing for the first twelve months (I receive between three and six of these offers a day), split the outstanding balance on card #1 between them, and a year later negotiated with the other companies for a fixed rate of 7% that would last for the duration of the loan. I negotiated by simply threatening to cancel the card and get another one, and they (or their handsome, male, gay-sounding representatives) all quickly agreed to this low rate, particularly when I pointed out that it was well above prime. About a year later, I paid them off too, and then stuck them in a drawer, thinking that perhaps they might be useful in a refugee situation or some other dire fix where access to quick funding would make the difference between comfort and discomfort. "How sage you are, Radical," people would say as we settled into a comfortable hotel suite with our fluffy dog Breezy after a devastating hurricane, while they were breathing formaldehyde in government-issued trailers.

And yet there are two problems with having a lot of extra credit cards. One is that it is easy to lose track of them, because they blend in easily with ordinary household junk. One of my habits when I travel is to stick one of these cards in a Secret Location, so that if my pocket is picked I am not entirely without funds. Once, however, utterly by accident, I discovered that two ladies who had arrived under the auspices of Happy Housewives Homecleaning Services, and who left claiming that they had forgotten their vacuum cleaner (??), had filched one of these cards from an open suitcase. They were able to fill up their SUV and buy many cartons of ciggies at the Pequot reservation before I realized what was going on, canceled the card, and reported them. Not fun, on any level, particularly having to choose between reporting two desperately poor (but ambitious) women who wanted to go into the tobacco business and picking up the bill for their enterprise. Fortunately they were just petty thieves, and didn't find themselves in need of a set of antique nesting tables. But that taught me a lesson: if you are going to keep extra credit cards around, secure them.

The second problem is that before you know it, you have forty or fifty thousand dollars of credit available to you, which is no joke, particularly if you ever need a loan for something serious, like putting a new roof on the house, since all that credit counts against you when the bank is assessing you for a real loan. And for some reason, when the economy was tanking, that made me feel particularly vulnerable, perhaps because it was the one thing on which I could act. So I canceled WaMu (this was shortly before they stopped being WaMu, and I remember thinking at the time that their representative was particularly listless); and I canceled Chase (they resisted a little, but gave way). By the time I got to Citibank Amex, a card I do use every month for recurring household expenses, things were a little more complicated: I had to shift a bunch of bills to monthly payments from my checking account, then paid the remaining balance and called to cancel.

The representative put up vigorous resistance, so vigorous that I thought I would in fact keep this card as my backup. Now, just yesterday, I received a bill in the mail from Citibank for -- 50 cents. That's right. 50 cents. Why? Because that's what they charge you every month if you do not maintain a balance. And I swear to you, in the course of a conversation in which that nice gay man offered me the moon and the stars, he never mentioned that I would be charged just to have the card available. Had he done so, I would have canceled it, not because I can't afford six dollars a year, but on principle. And you know that, should I neglect to pay that 50 cents some month, they would charge me a $35 late payment fee.

If anyone in banking or government is listening out there: this is what is wrong with our financial system. Cheat, cheat, cheat. I believe that there were a great many people out there for whom having stuff they could not afford filled a great, aching hole. But I also believe that if you take a look at people like me, you will see a range of experiences: people being cheated a little bit here and a little bit there, and told in great surprise that the rule they have violated was right there, in .5 point type on page 13 of the agreement that revised their contract with the bank (a document they received last May.) Once I realized that, because I was paying my credit card off every month, I was getting the bill more and more frequently. Upon investigation, I learned that my credit cycle had been shortened to 17 days. I can only believe that the point was to trick me into "missing" a payment, when in fact I had literally just paid the bill.

I rarely take advantage of commercial credit now except for expedience, such as charging up reimbursable professional expenses (warning: when reimbursed, do not go out and buy a TV instead of paying the bill.) Mostly, for internet purchases and low-cash situations, I use my handy debit card (warning: if you pay for monthly expenses on a credit card and have no savings, you need to wean yourself to this system gradually, otherwise you suddenly run out of money in the middle of the month, as you are paying for everything twice in a single thirty-day cycle. And never give a hotel a debit card at the beginning of your stay, as they will put a hold on your checking account for a substantial sum of money that takes weeks to release.) But I also make enough money that I don't have to rely on credit to go on vacation, pay a medical bill or a car repair, the kind of thing that can put an ordinary person (an assistant professor paying student loans, for example) behind the eight ball for several months. As a household, we have a great, fixed-rate mortgage we can afford, and we have enough savings that we can make up a month's budget shortfall from our other resources, even in the midst of this great crash. But my own experiences doing business with (read: getting screwed by) huge interstate commercial banks do give me cause me to believe that the de-regulation of our financial system has made a great many people into permanent debtors by locking them into multiple "agreements" with banks that they cannot possibly understand, "agreements" that are deliberately altered in arcane and unpredictable ways to fool people into violating the terms they have "agreed" to. That I keep receiving such offers every day, and multiple offers over the internet, to consolidate my debt into one low, low payment when I am simultaneously hearing on the news that small businesses cannot get the loans they need to maintain inventory, suggests to me that we are still swimming with the sharks economically; and that as a nation, we are a long way from grappling with the corrupt corporate practices designed to take money from those who can least afford it and siphon it upward.

As Wall Street Tumbles, Herbert Hoover -- er, John McCain -- Claims That "The Fundamentals Of The Economy Are Still Strong."

Well, thank you Mary Sunshine.

Seriously folks, the economy hasn't been sound for a long time, making it even more bizarre that John McCain made this claim yesterday, shortly after Lehman Brothers went down the tube. Even if -- as at least one source correctly asserts -- this phrase was part of a longer speech that acknowledges the current situation as worrisome, how can McCain float this fantasy when economists of all political persuasions are asserting that the economy has not hit bottom yet? That the worst may be yet to come? (Even the Radical, who does not pray often, is praying for you, AIG. And for you, WaMu.) Click here for video posted by CBS News that shows Obama finally getting aggressive; click here for video posted by FP Passport, a web log published by the journal Foreign Policy, that shows a longer clip from the McCain speech than I have quoted above.

The Radical keeps imagining that she and other historians of the Great Depression will begin to have their phones ring off the hook, so eager will news organizations be to hear their wisdom about the current crisis and the comparisons between John McCain and Mr. Hoover. But I suspect it is not to be. The Lehrer News Hour will keep going back to those tried and true Presidential historians, Michael Beschloss and Richard Norton Smith. Once more, stardom will elude me ("Mr. DeMille, I am ready for my close-up!")

Among those whose faith in the stewardship of the Republican party seems to have been shattered for the time being is conservative columnist David Brooks, whose piece in today's New York Times, "Why Experience Matters" seems to be a sincere attempt to bring the Republican base down to earth about what the "vote for the guy you want to have a beer with" attitude has bought for both the masses, as well as the classes. "The issue starts with an evaluation of Palin, but does not end there," Brooks writes. "This argument also is over what qualities the country needs in a leader and what are the ultimate sources of wisdom." Although Brooks acknowledges the critical importance of tension between elite conservatism and popular conservatism, he condemns the Bush administration for its ineptitude, and warns that votes for "ordinary people" are not, in themselves, a path to good government as populist demagogues claim. He continues:

Experienced leaders can certainly blunder if their minds have rigidified (see: Rumsfeld, Donald), but the records of leaders without long experience and prudence is not good. As George Will pointed out, the founders used the word “experience” 91 times in the Federalist Papers. Democracy is not average people selecting average leaders. It is average people with the wisdom to select the best prepared.

Sarah Palin has many virtues. If you wanted someone to destroy a corrupt establishment, she’d be your woman. But the constructive act of governance is another matter. She has not been engaged in national issues, does not have a repertoire of historic patterns and, like President Bush, she seems to compensate for her lack of experience with brashness and excessive decisiveness.

The idea that “the people” will take on and destroy “the establishment” is a utopian fantasy that corrupted the left before it corrupted the right. Surely the response to the current crisis of authority is not to throw away standards of experience and prudence, but to select leaders who have those qualities but not the smug condescension that has so marked the reaction to the Palin nomination in the first place.

Nicely put, David, and a very gracious way of admitting that things have gone tragically, fatally awry under the Presidency of that guy a majority of voters actually did not want to have a beer with, but the oil industry and the financial industry did. And in case anyone has noticed, there is a growing movement of conservative intellectuals who are turning on the McCain candidacy because of his choice of Sarah Palin, her lack of seasoning, the ethical questions about her policies as governor, and the kind of cynicism about the electorate that the choice of such a person represents when there were so many better qualified people (many of whom were extreme social conservatives, many of whom were women.) Some of us might argue that this cynicism about the voting public is only the Reagan candidacy carried to an extreme, but as someone who is studying that period, I would say the jury is out on this one. Perhaps the great untold story of the first Reagan administration is how people around the president rejected social extremism, over and over again, while simultaneously pursuing the kinds of changes in the nation's regulatory structure that ultimately produced the crisis we are living with this morning. It is a complicated history to say the least.

Um, Jim -- I'm in the office all day if you want to give me a ring.

But let's get back to the Second Great Depression, and to its more local effects. Many of us stopped opening our investment report from TIAA-CREF over a year ago, although I am heartened to see they have not yet been mentioned in this collapse, difficult as it may be to imagine that they too are not implicated in the subprime mortgage market scandal. However, we in the academy can't begin to understand yet how the current crisis will affect us. One of the things I wonder is how many students will begin to find that their highly leveraged parents are unable to pay the bills? And do places like Zenith have anywhere near the resources to plug the gap for students who are suddenly in need of financial aid packages? And I am not just talking about the children of the super-rich, of which we have a-plenty. How about the children of the secretaries and administrative assistants and janitors and coffee vendors of the super-rich? We aren't seeing many photos of them leaving Lehman Brothers, are we? (Although, since those photos and video look more like a perp walk than anything else, that may be ok.) Their children go to Zenith too. And we are going to have to come up with the money to help all of them.

Some people are frantic right now about the future: I'm just thanking my lucky stars that I am healthy enough and young enough to work for a couple decades. And kind of fascinated that what I began thinking about as a dissertation field back in 1984 is happening all over again.

And hoping that the American people get out there in November and vote for Roosevelt, not Hoover.