Hopeful Romantics – Page 14 – Social Commentary : Politics, Romance, Art, Culture, Health, Life at Large

The Vintage Whine of Academia

Some years ago when asked his opinion about campus politics, Henry Kissinger said, “University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.” This was an interesting response and one that has endured with me for quite some time. Nevertheless, when confronting academia, socially or otherwise, it isn’t long before Kissinger’s explanation of the vicissitude of campus politics regurgitates like a bad burrito. I am struck by how so many academics are sad cases burdened by the years of repetition that has led in many cases to a total lack of originality in thought and expression.

Given that I have a jaundiced view of much of academia, I still found it surprising that several professors claimed that tenure fights are stressful and can lead to emotional breakdowns. According to an article in Boston.com, entitled Professors Say Tenure Fights Creates High Stress Situations, David Yamada, director of the New Workplace Institute at Suffolk University Law School, and James Alan Fox, a professor of criminology, law, and public policy, at Northeastern University urged separately that the Universities should reevaluate the tenure process. They urged that the tenure process be more transparent and less “gut wrenching,,” as Fox put it.

Yamada noted that college officials should be “more in tune with the psychological health of the tenure-seeking professor. It was noted in the article that the tenure process can take about six or seven years and prove very stressful. Those applying for tenure, it was reported, are under intense scrutiny and may have to contemplate the possibility of failure. All in all, the article described the tenure process as long and tough. It can make the teacher a nervous wreck. It can lead to tragedy.

The two professors cited the recent incident with Amy Bishop as an example. Bishop was the Harvard educated professor who when denied tenure shot six college professors at the University of Alabama. She killed three and wounded three others. This was their example of a stressed out tenure applicant, reacting to the pressure. They did admit this may be an extreme case, but still…oh the pressure.

Never mind that Amy Bishop had a history of nutty behavior. Not the least of that nutty behavior was the reported accidental killing of her brother. Her finger was somehow on the trigger and, BANG, the shotgun just went off. This is a woman with all sorts of graduate degrees and a Harvard education who reportedly had a problem cleaning a shotgun.. Well…okay.

This was the Amy Bishop who was charged with assault at an IHOP, after demanding another customer yield her booster seat so Bishop could use it for her child. When the woman refused, Bishop punched at her and screamed some not-very-professorial epithets at the poor woman. This nut job who should have never been teaching in the first place is their example of tenure stress.

I take issue with the two denizens of the Ivory Tower, by writing every job worth having is stressful. Every day in the real world people sweat out their working careers, hoping they are not fired because of age, race, or sexual or social predilections. They hope they won’t be downsized because of a merger and acquisition. They pray they won’t be laid off with the economic meltdown.

What kind of insular perspective believes that academics should not be under scrutiny for performance and ability? This is the case in private industry, so why not at a college or university? You can be sure at that same college or university someone is eyeballing the janitor to make sure he is doing his job. The kid at the local Dominoes better not burn too many pizzas, otherwise he is out pocket money for his condoms and pot. Everybody is under stress.

In fact, with the economic downturn, millions are out of work and the millions left are forced to pick up the slack of being overwhelmed and undermanned. Employers are working with bare bones staffs, and heaven forbid if they can’t maintain performance. Everyday millions of people either hope to hang onto their jobs or strive to find another one.

There are millions or workers out there who aren’t just stressed, but terrified they will lose their jobs. Some, like Amy Bishop, who are tightly wrapped, have revisited their workplace to shoot and kill their bosses and fellow workers. Most won’t. Most will steel up and do the best they can, given the fears and pressures of unemployment.

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But this sudden whining about the tenure process is the equivalent of academic dodge ball. Some educators decided recently that the competition in dodge ball engenders negative extreme issues. The same here holds true. Competition apparently is not seen as distinguishing the best of our educators. Instead, competition is viewed as the enervating demon that hovers about, nullifying the creative process.

In fact, one has to look askance in general at the creative process in academia.. Not to paint it with a broad brush, but I have never been overly impressed with creativity among academics. There are exceptions, and there are certainly are those who have distinguished themselves in various endeavors in the private sector and decided to give back to the community by teaching at universities. There are those who have distinguished themselves in more esoteric pursuits, and though their creativity is well received in a niche market, they can’t make a living just by what they produce. So they teach. Understood.

There are exceptions among those in the physical and economic sciences who through private funding and university resources perform much needed research and development that can benefit us all. And there are those who are simply damn good teachers.

But then there are there those who engage in the campus politics of Kissinger’s description. This is their world. they live in it and even thrive in it. In the real world, where you actually have to actualize theory, many will perish. It is a group dependent on grants and foundational offerings and neither entrepreneurial or self-sufficient.

They give pointed views on subjects and issues that are best left to theory. They pronounce with certainly ambiguous concepts that simply can’t flourish any other place but academia. They impose questionable points of view on our kids and rigid definitions of creativity and artistry. Anything other than their own insulated thoughts are threatening and deemed the prejudices of the ignorant and misinformed.

And then they complain that their jobs are stressful. Tenure is a demoralizing bitch of a process that in its extreme can lead to bloodshed on the ivy. Teaching is tough. Life is tough. They are under scrutiny. They are being forced to perform.

Well cowboy up. And get real. At least you are working.

Puppetry of the Pearly Penile Papules

For many years now, the running commentary is that a man’s penis has a mind of its own. Or we have heard it said that the little head is in command of the big head. Maybe so. Maybe not.

But here is a case where a man’s penis should have maybe done the thinking for him. Apparently the big head was cajoled and pressured into thrusting the little head into public scrutiny, where both person and penis were met with derisive comments and otherwise embarrassing results.

According to an article the Courthouse News Service, a man has filed a complaint against CBS Television Network. The man alleges the producers of the reality show, “The Doctors” tricked him into discussing his laser surgery before a live studio audience. The laser surgery was intended to remove “pearly penile papules.” Pearly penile papules are seemingly harmless skin colored bumps or pimples that I’m sure do little to enhance one’s sex appeal.

The man contends that he contacted the doctor at the surgery center, in La Jolla, California, for an appointment to consult about this $4,500 surgery. A couple of days later, the would-be patient received a call from “The Doctors” requesting he appear on the show. The offended party contends that he was unduly pressured into appearing on the show. He wasn’t told about the live studio audience. The show was broadcast, he alleges, without his consent.

The man now claims he has suffered “relentless embarrassment and harassment.” He claims he receives less than complimentary phone calls and emails from friends and acquaintances who have commented on his television debut. We can only imagine the content of the voice mails and emails, but there is little doubt they can prove unnerving.

Honestly, I feel bad for the guy. He may have a case.; he may not. He may have been tricked or he may have imagined himself aglow in the light of celebrity. I don’t know. Television producers in need of willing and gullible subjects can be very persuasive. They can work their charms and hammer you in every way until your relinquish yourself to their programming needs.

In the mood of the times, it is flattering at first that you Joe Blow from wherever are suddenly a point of focus. It can bring some distraction to your everyday life. People will notice you. In a bad economy with jobs outsourced and not all that many prospects out there, you could make yourself famous. It’s like marathon dancing during the Great Depression. A long shot. And often painful.

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So when life is drab and your money is short, when Hollywood calls you may want to consider the possibilities. This is the age, after all, were privacy woefully lacks the currency it once had. In a bad economy, especially, you can’t make yourself rich and famous by secreting your most intimate biases, dreams, and sexual proclivities. Just walk down the street or stand on any elevator where someone is yammering away about their love life and not-so-secret desires. Do they care that you are standing around wondering what kind of imbecile makes all this known to the public? Not in the least. Either they don’t care or they want you to look at them, take notice, think of them as someone engaged in a life more exotic than its somber reality.

Integrity and decorum have long fallen by the wayside as the multitudes seek to gain the advantage over their peers by exhibiting themselves in some absurd fashion, by having more babies, uttering believed to be metaphysical by some and nonsense to the dwindling quantity of discerning minds. Couple this was the fact that most people are in fact functionally illiterate, so signing away their life on documents they are unable to read is more commonplace than ever before. They buy houses, cars, and get involved in get rich quick schemes by passing over the fine print. They claim in the aftermath that they were victimized by virtue that they were either incapable or too lazy to read the documents with which they were presented.

The quest for fame is even greater than the quest for sex. Both may be ephemeral and ultimately unsatisfying, but the quest for celebrity in this day and age is the strongest urge. The quest for celebrity emanates from conditions of alienation and anonymity. More often than not the feeling of one’s loneliness and insignificance can only be sated when not one but thousand or millions of eyes turn their eyes away from their iPhones and cast them onto you.

For that brief recognition people will subject themselves to damn near anything. They will have sex with animals or talk about their worst moments to their twenty million best friends. They will humiliate themselves at every level and willingly swap their dignity for celebrity with only the slightest bit of prompting. Where there once was a time where you had to pry out someone’s innermost secrets, in quest of celebrity you can’t shut them up.

What is remarkable is that someone who finds the cure for AIDS will have the same amount of celebrity as, say, the Octomom. There is no discrimination. Famous is famous. We may claim otherwise, but it’s not the truth. They are here and they are gone. Unless they manage in some way through some gift of accomplishment or media savvy to sustain our fickle attentions. Otherwise, they are off the show and back on their cell phones, pumping up their inflated sense of accomplishment.

When Unemployment Makes You Goofy

These are tough times. These are tough times globally, but for the United States this is also no day a the beach. These are tough times economically, what with personal wealth devastated by the real estate market, the depletion of pensions funds. Money is scarce and credit is tight.

What money there is in the banks and among the fat cats is being horded. The government seems weak and ineffective in forcing the banks to literally get off a dime. While the media shifts back and forth, trumpeting contradictory statistics, supposed financial and industrial experts inveigh equally conflicting predictions about the the economic recovery. The more honest of the pundits, after hemming and hawing on air time, in order to collect their money or sell their book, finally admit, “hell, I don’t know.”

Whether there will be an economic recovery or where there will be a double dip, where the economy drops, recovers and then drops again like some erratic roller coaster ride, it all remains to be seen. Meanwhile, people need to find work. They need to make bucks just to survive or in the luckier cases supplement their diminished savings, before it leaves them looking like bit players in “The Grapes of Wrath.”

So where do you find work when there is not work? Good question. Where do you find work when a great many jobs have either been rendered obsolete or have been outsourced to another country? Simply. Why you go to Disneyland, of course.

If not Disneyland, then you attend the job fairs at any one of the amusement parks and destination sites where people with a couple of bucks left still take their families. According to an article in The Los Angeles Times, amusement park job fairs are enjoying, if that’s the word, record turnouts. It’s not just kids anymore, recent high school and college graduates looking for a summer job or something to do until they can find something else, that are attending the job fairs. Be it the Disney Parks, Knotts Berry Farm, Six Flags, Universal Studios, or Hoolah’s Tuba Land, job candidates from every background and of every description are lining up and looking for work.

At a recent job fair at Six Flags Magic Mountain, in Valencia, California, more than 1,600 applicants stood in line in search of work. Another 1,100 attended the job fair at Universal Studios, Hollywood. Those who attended were mortgage agents and sales clerks. These are teachers and construction workers, forklift operators. These are office managers and restaurant managers, loan processors and once-retired seniors who thought they had enough to retire until the economic meltdown and the loss to their portfolio and pensions made them think again.

These are people looking to work for less than $400 a week. To be Goofy in an amusement park. In this day and age, $400 a week is a long way from big money. It is a long way from what most of us deem “a living.” It is the kind of salary that makes you feel impotent and humiliated, that assures your purchases will be largely guided by what is being featured at the Dollar Store. It is the kind of money that allows you to believe at least you are doing something to tide you over and feed your family, until something better comes along. And then, if nothing better does come along, it is the kind of money that reminds you at the end of every week there is probably no way out.

In short, we have not only ruined an economy. We have damaged its people. Through greed, unnecessary risk, and blatant audacity we have all but bankrupted a country. We have caused such grievous harm to ourselves, and yet we wonder why there are so many among us who become Tea Baggers or whatever, to vent their anger. No matter how misdirected we believe the anger may be, there is no denying people have the right to be extremely pissed off.

We have allowed the few, the venal, and the undisciplined to not only steal away our money but steal away our future as well. For this they are rewarded. For this, we make excuses and mumble something about our institutions being too big to fail and then pray that people will be distracted by one more stupid romance, an athlete gone awry, or a prefabricated news event. We hope that the distractions will prevent the anger from escalating into more tangible manifestations, other than parading around with misspelled signs.

Some claim this is the Great Recession and second only to our Great Depression. While much of it may be true, I also beg to differ. When the Great Depression ended, American people had jobs to which they could return. We had our industries intact. There wasn’t talk of technical innovations and alternate fuel sources creating new jobs, while our present industries were demoted to the trash heaps or shipped offshore. We didn’t have a situation where the greatest concern was the bottom line, to the point where industries were downsized and American workers deemed obsolete by virtue of their professions and job descriptions.
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When we recovered from the Great Depression, there was industry and with the industry there were jobs. And from the jobs came money, and with the money people were able to buy what they needed. But after the Great Recession, many jobs are gone and will never return to these shores. These were jobs were people worked, made their livings, had their dignity. But not now.

If there are no jobs, then where do people come up with the money to buy what they need? How do they send their kids to school? How do they enjoy the brief time they have on Earth? Certainly those who used Tarp money to consolidate their own businesses and award themselves bonuses haven’t given it much consideration. Clearly, from the way they ran this country into the ground, they are not prone to think that far in advance.

In short, we may have demoted ourselves to a second tier nation. We have former industrial workers now performing menial service tasks in rusted and blighted cities. We have journalists out of work, news sources collapsing around us. Small businesses are in jeopardy and have no credit sources. We have collapsing infrastructures and a public education system that does anything but make our kids competitive in the global economy.

I know, I hear others say, “well hey compared to other countries around the world, we are still doing pretty well.” This is sophistry. We have been reduced as a nation to comparing ourselves to less fortunate nations, developing nations, so that we can somehow feel better about our own condition. It is no longer a nation where we are looking toward a brighter future, except for maybe in television commercials and in the rhetoric of politicians. Never mind that our condition stinks, and as adults we are looking for jobs in a theme park. We should take refuge in the fact our long term outlook isn’t quite as dismal as that of some other country.

In an oblique way, it may be a good thing millions of us are on Prozac or some other antidepressant. If not, then the wacky outbursts we are seeing in the news with increasing frequency may turn into ever more violent wacky outbursts. The pissed off may become more organized and encourage true public disobedience. The Tea Baggers in true American tradition may put down those misspelled signs, grab a little tar and feathers, and start hoisting the bonus babies on rails. Out of work intellectuals could join them, along with the downsized and disenfranchised and the permanently neglected.

I am not saying this should happen. There are better ways to address our problems and to solve the present and future crises. But when the political body proves unresponsive, and when people feel they are being overtaxed and without representation, true representation, legislators concerned with the public interest and not lining their own pockets, then history dictates that things can get out of hand. History is indeed in this way a cruel teacher. History is an even harsher teacher when its lessons are ignored.

I don’t believe we are in anyway near the breaking point, reaching critical mass, if you will, where the people start acting up and the Shays Rebellion and the Boston Tea Party start looking like good ideas. I think we are a country too smart to tear itself entirely apart, having learned that lesson 150 years ago in our previous debacle known as The Civil War. But life is full of surprises, and with the advent of modern media and technology, news travels fast if not all that accurately.

But let’s face it. Unemployed people need something to do. If you are an adult and working a menial job for $400 a week, then the magic is gone from our magic mountain.

Burying a Generation in Student Debt

The good news is that a student will graduate from college. With a college degree, a younger person has a greater capability of shaping his career and life in general. The student has the opportunity to make more money. Advancements come easier when you have a college degree. Or so the story goes.

The fact is many college students are drowning in debt created by borrowing money to go to school. They borrowed the money out of necessity, to obtain a decent education. Without a college education, you then are stuck with a high school education, which for all intent and purpose is pretty useless in this modern age.

Kids borrow the money and graduate college, believing there will be jobs and opportunity. Instead, for the last number of years they have walked into a world where the jobs are limited, the economy in a meltdown, and where outsourcing to other countries has depleted the job market. Competition for jobs is fierce and the student debt keeps piling up. According to the Huffington Post , the average student will graduate $23,000 in debt. I believe that is a very conservative estimate. Having looked over the cost of college tuition recently, that’s about one year’s tuition in most public universities.

There are two kinds of student loans. The first is the Stafford or government loan. It is a good loan, but it has its limitations. Mainly, you can’t borrow all the money you need as a student. So, especially if you enroll in a private school, you take out private loans. From a bank. Which is guaranteed by the Federal government.

Fannie Mae and Sallie Mae employ some 35,000 persons. They are the middle men in the great bank loan debacle. They and the banks employ lobbyists to persuade congressman to do such things as deny students what’s left of the common consumer rights that most people enjoy. Students can not file bankruptcy as a means of walking away from their loans. Should they hit a bad patch, and many graduates have, then the interest builds, compounds, becomes outrageous and the bank can assess an additional 25% on the principal should the student have the tough luck to default.

It is probably the closest thing to indentured bondage we have seen in this country in quite awhile. The kind of slavery we cluck in anguish over, should it happen to immigrants who have their freedom held for ransom by the coyotes and others who smuggled them into this country for exorbitant prices. But when it happens to our kids, well hell, it’s just a matter of doing business. We just sell them down the river.

The student loan system is a disgrace. Or I should say the part where students are forced to borrow from private banks for the extra money they need. It preys upon the poor and middle class, the kids whose parents are either too poor or too strapped in a bad economy to pay for their tuition. Work your way through college? With college tuition as high as it is, this is hardly likely. If you could live, eat, and pay your tuition you would have the kind of job in the first place that wouldn’t require you to sacrifice it for a college diploma.

There is a reform bill proposed by Congress, but lobbyists are working hard to beat it down. The banks detest the fact that the loan money may go directly to the students without the banks taking their unfair share of the cut. So they can jack up the interest rates and bonus their executives for a job well done. So they can pay off persons in the legislature so they will not institute any real reform. It’s not bribery, of course. It is campaign contributions, a couple of dozen favors, and a job once you retire from the hallowed halls of Congress.

And kids starve. They struggle. They try to gain traction in an already tough and competitive world. They watched their jobs outsourced by another group of corporate interests who also lobby Congress so they can send American jobs overseas while still enjoying hefty tax cuts.
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This is an entire generation we are talking about, with additional generations to follow. This is our best and our brightest. And we are screwing them royally. Charging them a bunch for the opportunity to go to school and make something of themselves, and then holding their lives for ransom afterwords. It’s a new form of the old company store, where the company owns everything and the coal mine, including your ass.

We watch self-righteous legislators go on about how budgetary concerns are burdening and bankrupting our future generations. But we don’t hear much about the burden of student loans. Not more than a whisper. Never mind the fact that the poor kids in the land of opportunity, make that the new poor, the middle class, are disrupted at the starting gate from seizing that opportunity. Forget that we took away their consumer rights with the sole justification being that they are students.

Forget everything. Including the future.