Category: General

The business of higher ed

This piece features more juicy tidbits on the 501(c)(3) racket known as New York University, but its real target is the Educational Administrative Complex more generally.

It features a link to this very interesting –although too conspiratorial and intentionalist as opposed to structuralist — post from a blog called The Homeless Adjunct:

At latest count, we have 1.5 million university professors in this country, 1 million of whom are adjuncts. One million professors in America are hired on short-term contracts, most often for one semester at a time, with no job security whatsoever….earning, on average, $20K a year gross, with no benefits or healthcare, no unemployment insurance when they are out of work…

If you are old enough to remember when medicine was forever changed by the appearance of the ‘HMO’ model of managed medicine, you will have an idea of what has happened to academia….once Nixon secured passage of the HMO Act in 1973, the organizations went quickly from operating on a non-profit organization model, focused on high quality health care for controlled costs, to being for-profit organizations, with lots of corporate money funding them – and suddenly the idea of high-quality health care was sacrificed in favor of profits – which meant taking in higher and higher premiums and offering less and less service, more denied claims, more limitations placed on doctors, who became a “managed profession”. You see the state of healthcare in this country, and how disastrous it is. Well, during this same time, there was a similar kind of development — something akin to the HMO — let’s call it an “EMO”, Educational Management Organization, began to take hold in American academia. From the 1970s until today, as the number of full-time faculty jobs continued to shrink, the number of full-time administrative jobs began to explode. As faculty was deprofessionalized and casualized, reduced to teaching as migrant contract workers, administrative jobs now offered good, solid salaries, benefits, offices, prestige and power. In 2012, administrators now outnumber faculty on every campus across the country.

Can the numbers in the block quote be right? Are there really one million adjunct college professors in a country with an adult population of around 240 million people? The 500,000 tenure track professor number also sounds high — especially given the claim that there are more administrators outnumber faculty — but I haven’t looked at the stats for higher ed generally, as opposed to law schools.

. . . a little digging in the Census data indicates the numbers regarding total faculty are accurate (the claim regarding administrators still seems implausible, unless essentially all staff are being counted as “administrators.”) There were 1.44 million college faculty in the US in 2009, half of whom were classified as part-time, and undoubtedly a significant portion of those classified as full-time were full-time adjuncts.

Anyway, read both pieces.

O bloody period!

A friend of mine is bothered by the absence of a standard English punctuation mark that captures something in the emotional spectrum between the matter of fact period and what one might call the “sincere exclamation point.”

Example of the latter:

Thanks for pulling me out of that burning bus!

It troubles him that we also have to make do with what might be termed the hyper-inflationary exclamation point, i.e., thanks for getting me a copy of that memo!

Shouldn’t, he wonders, there be something in between? (I suppose internet emoticons are a manifestation of this urge, but you can’t put a blinking smiley face in formal written texts — not yet anyway, LOL!)

Are there languages that have gradations between the stern “.” and the effusive “!” ?

And what would a good intermediate punctuation mark look like?

. . . does the Japanese “neh” perform something like this function?

Even the Conservative Antonin Scalia!

An Arizona vote suppression law goes down 7-2. Scalia’s majority opinion was predictably grudging, but I’ll take it.

I also note the disingenuousness of Alito’s sudden discovery of the principle that there should be a strong presumption against pre-emption:

It should be noted, however, that the presumption against preemption expressed by Thomas and especially Alito in this case is highly selective. When the rights of corporations rather than voters were involved, Alito and Thomas were both willing to find that federal law preempted state law even though the statutory language of the federal law in question clearly did not conflict with the state’s. In fairness, Thomas has at least sporadically been willing to apply a strong presumption against pre-emption when it conflicts with corporate interests. Alito’s presumption against pre-emption extends exactly as far as pre-emption is inconsistent with Republican policy objectives.

Give this to Alito: he’s consistent. Not legally consistent, but…

The Right to a Jury Trial Finally Applies to Mandatory Minimums

In 2000, the Supreme Court held (in an opinion by Stevens, joned by Scalia) that the Sixth Amendment requires that sentencing be based only on factors that have been proven to a jury or adduced in a plea agreement. Two years later, however, in United States v. Harris the Court rather inexplicably narrowed this requirement in an opinion that, as Justice Thomas wrote in dissent, “rests on either a misunderstanding or a rejection of the very principles that animated Apprendi just two years ago.” Harris was given a mandatory minimum sentence based on a factor (brandishing a firearm) that was not proven to a jury or adduced in a plea. Eight justices in Harris logically cast the same votes, but for some mysterious reason Scalia switched sides and upheld the sentence.

Today, the Supreme Court decided to eliminate what was always an inexplicable anomaly, as Harris was overruled. Justice Thomas again noted the obvious incompatibility of Apprendi and Harris:

In Apprendi, we held that a fact is by definition an element of the offense and must be submitted to the jury if it increases the punishment above what is otherwise legally prescribed.  While Harris declined to extend this principle to facts increasing mandatory minimum sentences, Apprendi’s definition of “elements” necessarily includes not only facts that increase the ceiling, but also those that increase the floor. Both kinds of facts alter the prescribed range of sentences to which a defendant is exposed and do so in a manner that aggravates the punishment.  Facts that increase the mandatory minimum sentence are therefore elements and must be submitted to the jury and found beyond a reasonable doubt.

While the appointments of Barack Obama and George W. Bush voted in the expected pro- and anti- civil liberties direction, the key swing in this case was Breyer. Breyer reiterated his disagreement with Apprendi as an initial matter, but argued that because it remained in force “the law should no longer tolerate the anomaly that the Apprendi/Harris distinction creates.” As Sotomayor’s concurrence points out, because of this anomaly stare decisis can’t be seen to have much force in this particular case, pace Alito’s dissent.

I note also that, as in Harris, the World’s Last Principled Jurist Antonin Scalia has declined to write and explain his inexplicable vote pattern, which is probably sound judgement.

Taking the What Now?

Shorter reasonable, moderate, thinking person’s conservative Sam Alito: “The Fifth Amendment does not entail a right to remain silent.”

A Rubber Stamp, Not A Court

While one would expect the majority of warrant requests made by authorities to be accepted by the magistrate, the rejection rate of the FISA court is so insanely low that it’s reasonable to wonder if the process provides only a Potemkin simulation of oversight rather than actual oversight. U.S. District Judge Nancy Gertner confirms suspicions of empty formalism:

As a former Article III judge, I can tell you that your faith in the FISA Court is dramatically misplaced.

Two reasons: One … The Fourth Amendment frameworks have been substantially diluted in the ordinary police case. One can only imagine what the dilution is in a national security setting. Two, the people who make it on the FISA court, who are appointed to the FISA court, are not judges like me. Enough said.

[...]

It’s an anointment process. It’s not a selection process. But you know, it’s not boat rockers. So you have a [federal] bench which is way more conservative than before. This is a subset of that. And it’s a subset of that who are operating under privacy, confidentiality, and national security. To suggest that there is meaningful review it seems to me is an illusion.

The fact that the FISA court is barely any kind of check at all of course makes it all the more remarkable that the Bush administration was unwilling to follow the statutory guidelines.