The-Ave.US

Noam Chomsky Addresses the  Adjunct Faculty Association of the United Steelworkers

Edited transcript of remarks given by Chomsky via Skype on 4 February 2014 to a gathering of members and  allies of the Adjunct Faculty Association of the United Steelworkers  in Pittsburgh, PA. The transcript was prepared by Robin J. Sowards  and edited by Prof. Chomsky.

 On hiring faculty off the tenure track

That’s part of the business model. It’s the same as hiring temps in  industry or what they call “associates” at Wal-Mart, employees that  aren’t owed benefits. It’s a part of a corporate business model designed  to reduce labor costs and to increase labor servility. When universities  become corporatized, as has been happening quite systematically over the  last generation as part of the general neoliberal assault on the  population, their business model means that what matters is the bottom  line. The effective owners are the trustees (or the legislature, in the  case of state universities), and they want to keep costs down and make  sure that labor is docile and obedient. The way to do that is,  essentially, temps. Just as the hiring of temps has gone way up in the  neoliberal period, you’re getting the same phenomenon in the
universities. The idea is to divide society into two groups. One group  is sometimes called the “plutonomy” (a term used by Citibank when they  were advising their investors on where to invest their funds), the top  sector of wealth, globally but concentrated mostly in places like the
United States. The other group, the rest of the population, is a  “precariat,” living a precarious existence.

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This idea is sometimes made quite overt. So when Alan Greenspan was
testifying before Congress in 1997 on the marvels of the economy he was
running, he said straight out that one of the bases for its economic
success was imposing what he called “greater worker insecurity.” If
workers are more insecure, that’s very “healthy” for the society,
because if workers are insecure they won’t ask for wages, they won’t go
on strike, they won’t call for benefits; they’ll serve the masters
gladly and passively. And that’s optimal for corporations’ economic
health. At the time, everyone regarded Greenspan’s comment as very
reasonable, judging by the lack of reaction and the great acclaim he
enjoyed. Well, transfer that to the universities: how do you ensure
“greater worker insecurity”? Crucially, by not guaranteeing employment,
by keeping people hanging on a limb than can be sawed off at any time,
so that they’d better shut up, take tiny salaries, and do their work;
and if they get the gift of being allowed to serve under miserable
conditions for another year, they should welcome it and not ask for any
more. That’s the way you keep societies efficient and healthy from the
point of view of the corporations. And as universities move towards a
corporate business model, precarity is exactly what is being imposed.
And we’ll see more and more of it.

That’s one aspect, but there are other aspects which are also quite
familiar from private industry, namely a large increase in layers of
administration and bureaucracy. If you have to control people, you have
to have an administrative force that does it. So in US industry even
more than elsewhere, there’s layer after layer of management-a kind of
economic waste, but useful for control and domination. And the same is
true in universities. In the past 30 or 40 years, there’s been a very
sharp increase in the proportion of administrators to faculty and
students; faculty and students levels have stayed fairly level relative
to one another, but the proportion of administrators have gone way up.
There’s a very good book on it by a well-known sociologist, Benjamin
Ginsberg, called The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the
All-Administrative University and Why It Matters (Oxford University
Press, 2011), which describes in detail the business style of massive
administration and levels of administration-and of course, very
highly-paid administrators. This includes professional administrators
like deans, for example, who used to be faculty members who took off for
a couple of years to serve in an administrative capacity and then go
back to the faculty; now they’re mostly professionals, who then have to
hire sub-deans, and secretaries, and so on and so forth, a whole
proliferation of structure that goes along with administrators. All of
that is another aspect of the business model.

But using cheap labor-and vulnerable labor-is a business practice that
goes as far back as you can trace private enterprise, and unions emerged
in response. In the universities, cheap, vulnerable labor means adjuncts
and graduate students. Graduate students are even more vulnerable, for
obvious reasons. The idea is to transfer instruction to precarious
workers, which improves discipline and control but also enables the
transfer of funds to other purposes apart from education. The costs, of
course, are borne by the students and by the people who are being drawn
into these vulnerable occupations. But it’s a standard feature of a
business-run society to transfer costs to the people. In fact,
economists tacitly cooperate in this. So, for example, suppose you find
a mistake in your checking account and you call the bank to try to fix
it. Well, you know what happens. You call them up, and you get a
recorded message saying “We love you, here’s a menu.” Maybe the menu has
what you’re looking for, maybe it doesn’t. If you happen to find the
right option, you listen to some music, and every once and a while a
voice comes in and says “Please stand by, we really appreciate your
business,” and so on. Finally, after some period of time, you may get a
human being, who you can ask a short question to. That’s what economists
call “efficiency.” By economic measures, that system reduces labor costs
to the bank; of course it imposes costs on you, and those costs are
multiplied by the number of users, which can be enormous-but that’s not
counted as a cost in economic calculation. And if you look over the way
the society works, you find this everywhere. So the university imposes
costs on students and on faculty who are not only untenured but are
maintained on a path that guarantees that they will have no security.
All of this is perfectly natural within corporate business models. It’s
harmful to education, but education is not their goal.

In fact, if you look back farther, it goes even deeper than that. If you
go back to the early 1970s when a lot of this began, there was a lot of
concern pretty much across the political spectrum over the activism of
the 1960s; it’s commonly called “the time of troubles.” It was a “time
of troubles” because the country was getting civilized, and that’s
dangerous. People were becoming politically engaged and were trying to
gain rights for groups that are called “special interests,” like women,
working people, farmers, the young, the old, and so on. That led to a
serious backlash, which was pretty overt. At the liberal end of the
spectrum, there’s a book called The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the
Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission, Michel
Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington, Joji Watanuki (New York University Press,
1975), produced by the Trilateral Commission, an organization of liberal
internationalists. The Carter administration was drawn almost entirely
from their ranks. They were concerned with what they called “the crisis
of democracy,” namely that there’s too much democracy. In the 1960s
there were pressures from the population, these “special interests,” to
try to gain rights within the political arena, and that put too much
pressure on the state-you can’t do that. There was one special interest
that they left out, namely the corporate sector, because its interests
are the “national interest”; the corporate sector is supposed to control
the state, so we don’t talk about them. But the “special interests” were
causing problems and they said “we have to have more moderation in
democracy,” the public has to go back to being passive and apathetic.
And they were particularly concerned with schools and universities,
which they said were not properly doing their job of “indoctrinating the
young.” You can see from student activism (the civil rights movement,
the anti-war movement, the feminist movement, the environmental
movements) that the young are just not being indoctrinated properly.

Well how do you indoctrinate the young? There are a number of ways. One
way is to burden them with hopelessly heavy tuition debt. Debt is a
trap, especially student debt, which is enormous, far larger than credit
card debt. It’s a trap for the rest of your life because the laws are
designed so that you can’t get out of it. If a business, say, gets in
too much debt it can declare bankruptcy, but individuals can almost
never be relieved of student debt through bankruptcy. They can even
garnish social security if you default. That’s a disciplinary technique.
I don’t say that it was consciously introduced for the purpose, but it
certainly has that effect. And it’s hard to argue that there’s any
economic basis for it. Just take a look around the world: higher
education is mostly free. In the countries with the highest education
standards, let’s say Finland, which is at the top all the time, higher
education is free. And in a rich, successful capitalist country like
Germany, it’s free. In Mexico, a poor country, which has pretty decent
education standards, considering the economic difficulties they face,
it’s free. In fact, look at the United States: if you go back to the
1940s and 50s, higher education was pretty close to free. The GI Bill
gave free education to vast numbers of people who would never have been
able to go to college. It was very good for them and it was very good
for the economy and the society; it was part of the reason for the high
economic growth rate. Even in private colleges, education was pretty
close to free. Take me: I went to college in 1945 at an Ivy League
university, University of Pennsylvania, and tuition was $100. That would
be maybe $800 in today’s dollars. And it was very easy to get a
scholarship, so you could live at home, work, and go to school and it
didn’t cost you anything. Now it’s outrageous. I have grandchildren in
college, who have to pay for their tuition and work and it’s almost
impossible. For the students that is a disciplinary technique.

And another technique of indoctrination is to cut back faculty-student
contact: large classes, temporary teachers who are overburdened, who can
barely survive on an adjunct salary. And since you don’t have any job
security you can’t build up a career, you can’t move on and get more.
These are all techniques of discipline, indoctrination, and control. And
it’s very similar to what you’d expect in a factory, where factory
workers have to be disciplined, to be obedient; they’re not supposed to
play a role in, say, organizing production or determining how the
workplace functions-that’s the job of management. This is now carried
over to the universities. And I think it shouldn’t surprise anyone who
has any experience in private enterprise, in industry; that’s the way
they work.

   On how higher education ought to be

First of all, we should put aside any idea that there was once a “golden
age.” Things were different and in some ways better in the past, but far
from perfect. The traditional universities were, for example, extremely
hierarchical, with very little democratic participation in
decision-making. One part of the activism of the 1960s was to try to
democratize the universities, to bring in, say, student representatives
to faculty committees, to bring in staff to participate. These efforts
were carried forward under student initiatives, with some degree of
success. Most universities now have some degree of student participation
in faculty decisions. And I think those are the kinds of things we
should be moving towards: a democratic institution, in which the people
involved in the institution, whoever they may be (faculty, students,
staff), participate in determining the nature of the institution and how
it runs; and the same should go for a factory.

These are not radical ideas, I should say. They come straight out of
classical liberalism. So if you read, for example, John Stuart Mill, a
major figure in the classical liberal tradition, he took it for granted
that workplaces ought to be managed and controlled by the people who
work in them-that’s freedom and democracy (see, e.g., John Stuart Mill,
Principles of Political Economy, book 4, ch. 7). We see the same ideas
in the United States. Let’s say you go back to the Knights of Labor; one
of their stated aims was “To establish co-operative institutions such as
will tend to supersede the wage-system, by the introduction of a
co-operative industrial system” (“Founding Ceremony” for newly-organized
Local Associations). Or take someone like, John Dewey, a mainstream
20th-century social philosopher, who called not only for education
directed at creative independence in schools, but also worker control in
industry, what he called “industrial democracy.” He says that as long as
the crucial institutions of the society (like production, commerce,
transportation, media) are not under democratic control, then “politics
[will be] the shadow cast on society by big business” (John Dewey, “The
Need for a New Party”[1931]). This idea is almost elementary, it has
deep roots in American history and in classical liberalism, it should be
second nature to working people, and it should apply the same way to
universities. There are some decisions in a university where you don’t
want to have [democratic transparency because] you have to preserve
student privacy, say, and there are various kinds of sensitive issues,
but on much of the normal activity of the university, there is no reason
why direct participation can’t be not only legitimate but helpful. In my
department, for example, for 40 years we’ve had student representatives
helpfully participating in department meetings.

    On “shared governance” and worker control

The university is probably the social institution in our society that
comes closest to democratic worker control. Within a department, for
example, it’s pretty normal for at least the tenured faculty to be able
to determine a substantial amount of what their work is like: what
they’re going to teach, when they’re going to teach, what the curriculum
will be. And most of the decisions about the actual work that the
faculty is doing are pretty much under tenured faculty control. Now of
course there is a higher level of administrators that you can’t overrule
or control. The faculty can recommend somebody for tenure, let’s say,
and be turned down by the deans, or the president, or even the trustees
or legislators. It doesn’t happen all that often, but it can happen and
it does. And that’s always a part of the background structure, which,
although it always existed, was much less of a problem in the days when
the administration was drawn from the faculty and in principle
recallable. Under representative systems, you have to have someone doing
administrative work but they should be recallable at some point under
the authority of the people they administer. That’s less and less true.
There are more and more professional administrators, layer after layer
of them, with more and more positions being taken remote from the
faculty controls. I mentioned before The Fall of the Faculty by Benjamin
Ginsberg, which goes into a lot of detail as to how this works in the
several universities he looks at closely: Johns Hopkins, Cornell, and a
couple of others.

Meanwhile, the faculty are increasingly reduced to a category of
temporary workers who are assured a precarious existence with no path to
the tenure track. I have personal acquaintances who are effectively
permanent lecturers; they’re not given real faculty status; they have to
apply every year so that they can get appointed again. These things
shouldn’t be allowed to happen. And in the case of adjuncts, it’s been
institutionalized: they’re not permitted to be a part of the
decision-making apparatus, and they’re excluded from job security, which
merely amplifies the problem. I think staff ought to also be integrated
into decision-making, since they’re also a part of the university. So
there’s plenty to do, but I think we can easily understand why these
tendencies are developing. They are all part of imposing a business
model on just about every aspect of life. That’s the neoliberal ideology
that most of the world has been living under for 40 years. It’s very
harmful to people, and there has been resistance to it. And it’s worth
noticing that two parts of the world, at least, have pretty much escaped
from it, namely East Asia, where they never really accepted it, and
South America in the past 15 years.

On the alleged need for “flexibility”

“Flexibility” is a term that’s very familiar to workers in industry.
Part of what’s called “labor reform” is to make labor more “flexible,”
make it easier to hire and fire people. That’s, again, a way to ensure
maximization of profit and control. “Flexibility” is supposed to be a
good thing, like “greater worker insecurity.” Putting aside industry
where the same is true, in universities there’s no justification. So
take a case where there’s under-enrollment somewhere. That’s not a big
problem. One of my daughters teaches at a university; she just called me
the other night and told me that her teaching load is being shifted
because one of the courses that was being offered was under-enrolled.
Okay, the world didn’t to an end, they just shifted around the teaching
arrangements-you teach a different course, or an extra section, or
something like that. People don’t have to be thrown out or be insecure
because of the variation in the number of students enrolling in courses.
There are all sorts of ways of adjusting for that variation. The idea
that labor should meet the conditions of “flexibility” is just another
standard technique of control and domination. Why not say that
administrators should be thrown out if there’s nothing for them to do
that semester, or trustees-what do they have to be there for? The
situation is the same with top management in industry: if labor has to
be flexible, how about management? Most of them are pretty useless or
even harmful anyway, so let’s get rid of them. And you can go on like
this. Just to take the news from the last couple of days, take, say,
Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan Chase bank: he just got a pretty
substantial raise, almost double his salary, out of gratitude because he
had saved the bank from criminal charges that would have sent the
management to jail; he got away with only $20 billion in fines for
criminal activities. Well I can imagine that getting rid of somebody
like that might be helpful to the economy. But that’s not what people
are talking about when they talk about “labor reform.” It’s the working
people who have to suffer, and they have to suffer by insecurity, by not
knowing where tomorrow’s piece of bread is going to come from, and
therefore be disciplined and obedient and not raise questions or ask for
their rights. That’s the way that tyrannical systems operate. And the
business world is a tyrannical system. When it’s imposed on the
universities, you find it reflects the same ideas. This shouldn’t be any
secret.

    On the purpose of education

These are debates that go back to the Enlightenment, when issues of
higher education and mass education were really being raised, not just
education for the clergy and aristocracy. And there were basically two
models discussed in the 18th and 19th centuries. They were discussed
with pretty evocative imagery. One image of education was that it should
be like a vessel that is filled with, say, water. That’s what we call
these days “teaching to test”: you pour water into the vessel and then
the vessel returns the water. But it’s a pretty leaky vessel, as all of
us who went through school experienced, since you could memorize
something for an exam that you had no interest in to pass an exam and a
week later you forgot what the course was about. The vessel model these
days is called “no child left behind,” “teaching to test,” “race to
top,” whatever the name may be, and similar things in universities.
Enlightenment thinkers opposed that model.

The other model was described as laying out a string along which the
student progresses in his or her own way under his or her own
initiative, maybe moving the string, maybe deciding to go somewhere
else, maybe raising questions. Laying out the string means imposing some
degree of structure. So an educational program, whatever it may be, a
course on physics or something, isn’t going to be just anything goes; it
has a certain structure. But the goal of it is for the student to
acquire the capacity to inquire, to create, to innovate, to
challenge-that’s education. One world-famous physicist, in his freshman
courses if he was asked “what are we going to cover this semester?”, his
answer was “it doesn’t matter what we cover, it matters what you
discover.” You have gain the capacity and the self-confidence for that
matter to challenge and create and innovate, and that way you learn;
that way you’ve internalized the material and you can go on. It’s not a
matter of accumulating some fixed array of facts which then you can
write down on a test and forget about tomorrow.

These are two quite distinct models of education. The Enlightenment
ideal was the second one, and I think that’s the one that we ought to be
striving towards. That’s what real education is, from kindergarten to
graduate school. In fact there are programs of that kind for
kindergarten, pretty good ones.

    On the love of teaching

We certainly want people, both faculty and students, to be engaged in
activity that’s satisfying, enjoyable, challenging, exciting-and I don’t
really think that’s hard. Even young children are creative, inquisitive,
they want to know things, they want to understand things, and unless
that’s beaten out of your head it stays with you the rest of your life.
If you have opportunities to pursue those commitments and concerns, it’s
one of the most satisfying things in life. That’s true if you’re a
research physicist, it’s true if you’re a carpenter; you’re trying to
create something of value and deal with a difficult problem and solve
it. I think that’s what makes work the kind of thing you want to do; you
do it even if you don’t have to do it. In a reasonably functioning
university, you find people working all the time because they love it;
that’s what they want to do; they’re given the opportunity, they have
the resources, they’re encouraged to be free and independent and
creative-what’s better? That’s what they love to do. And that, again,
can be done at any level.

It’s worth thinking about some of the imaginative and creative
educational programs that are being developed at different levels. So,
for example, somebody just described to me the other day a program
they’re using in high schools, a science program where the students are
asked an interesting question: “How can a mosquito fly in the rain?”
That’s a hard question when you think about it. If something hit a human
being with the force of a raindrop hitting a mosquito it would
absolutely flatten them immediately. So how come the mosquito isn’t
crushed instantly? And how can the mosquito keep flying? If you pursue
that question-and it’s a pretty hard question-you get into questions of
mathematics, physics, and biology, questions that are challenging enough
that you want to find an answer to them.

That’s what education should be like at every level, all the way down to
kindergarten, literally. There are kindergarten programs in which, say,
each child is given a collection of little items: pebbles, shells,
seeds, and things like that. Then the class is given the task of finding
out which ones are the seeds. It begins with what they call a
“scientific conference”: the kids talk to each other and they try to
figure out which ones are seeds. And of course there’s some teacher
guidance, but the idea is to have the children think it through. After a
while, they try various experiments and they figure out which ones are
the seeds. At that point, each child is given a magnifying glass and,
with the teacher’s help, cracks a seed and looks inside and finds the
embryo that makes the seed grow. These children learn something-really,
not only something about seeds and what makes things grow; but also
about how to discover. They’re learning the joy of discovery and
creation, and that’s what carries you on independently, outside the
classroom, outside the course.

The same goes for all education up through graduate school. In a
reasonable graduate seminar, you don’t expect students to copy it down
and repeat whatever you say; you expect them to tell you when you’re
wrong or to come up with new ideas, to challenge, to pursue some
direction that hadn’t been thought of before. That’s what real education
is at every level, and that’s what ought to be encouraged. That ought to
be the purpose of education. It’s not to pour information into
somebody’s head which will then leak out but to enable them to become
creative, independent people who can find excitement in discovery and
creation and creativity at whatever level or in whatever domain their
interests carry them.

   On using corporate rhetoric against corporatization

This is kind of like asking how you should justify to the slave owner
that people shouldn’t be slaves. You’re at a level of moral inquiry
where it’s probably pretty hard to find answers. We are human beings
with human rights. It’s good for the individual, it’s good for the
society, it’s even good for the economy, in the narrow sense, if people
are creative and independent and free. Everyone benefits if people are
able to participate, to control their fate, to work with each other-that
may not maximize profit and domination, but why should we take those to
be values to be concerned about?

    Advice for adjunct faculty organizing unions

You know better than I do what has to be done, the kind of problems you
face. Just got ahead and do what has to be done. Don’t be intimidated,
don’t be frightened, and recognize that the future can be in our hands
if we’re willing to grasp it.

 Comments

+16 # Walter J Smith 2014-03-01 13:11
We have here a very good beginning of the discussion of how the US
university committed suicide through the 70s, 80s, 90s and since.
Page Smith (no relation) wrote a fine book on that when it was first
becoming clear: Killing the Spirit.
We mustn’t overlook how the corporate foundations and corporate research
funds were deployed to consolidate faculty positions into a much smaller
“super star faculty” fund so respective campuses could have a super star
professor who taught maybe one or two “super star students” annually in
each major discipline, while tying up what salary would normally hire
three to five regular tenure track faculty.
The corporate influence also entirely reorganized and redirected the
scientific research of the universities, so they now deliver us far more
weapons of mass disruption, poison for our foods (spin artistry instead
of effective speaking, high-fructose corn syrup, GMOs as food, GE
animals, and so on).
Meanwhile the social sciences & humanities were reduced to Pomo (post
modern) gibberish instead of philosophy, and pop art instead of
anthropology or sociology; and like cybernetic analysis of vote
patterns/manipu lations instead of political philosophy. In other words,
university civic life has been reduced to imperial manipulation on
behalf of the uber-wealthy who control election funding.
Much more needs to be addressed on the recent university’s
thorough-going, self-adeministe red dissolution.

+5 # WestWinds 2014-03-01 21:02
[quote name=”Walter J Smith”]We have here a very good beginning of the
discussion of how the US university committed suicide through the 70s,
80s, 90s and since.
— Actually, it began in the early 1960’s and became manifest (in
Boston at Harvard) in the mid 1960’s. The hue and cry went up bc the
saying was, “If you want to succeed in business, go down to Harvard and
turn Left.” But it became “turn Right” in the mid 1960’s and the
literati/illumi nati/intelligen tsia among college and university
communities were beside themselves bc they understood the extrapolated
ramifications of what was to come.

+3 # barbaratodish 2014-03-01 18:27
Though I am more of an “academic squatter”, than an academic, per se,
(namely I refuse to write and speak in academic jargon, so, as a result,
I’ve been banned from academic associations because, they said, I made
too many people uncomfortable! lol), nevertheless, I’ve taught as an
adjunct instructor at various universities, community colleges, etc.,
and I’ve encountered tenured faculty who were close to, if not actually,
illiterate. I’ve asked administrators if it is even possible that some
professors were illiterate and they answered. “It’s possible!” How did
these, close to illiterates, even get degrees? Perhaps they were bought
at higher ed diploma mills. DUH! Why and how are these functional
illiterates and some,(many?) educators who are unfunctional illiterates
or unfunctional literates, for that matter, too, given tenure, etc., in
primary and secondary schools as well as in dumbed down higher ed and
how do they keep tenure? Perhaps because it is a case of “The emperor is
wearing no clothes?” Perhaps there is a “conspiracy” or just apathy,
denial, or fear of being scrutinized oneself if one becomes a
whistleblower, etc., and perhaps that causes those in education to look
away while the stupidest are recruited, groomed, vetted, indoctrinated,
and while the most sheeple-ish of all individuals are herded into
teaching so that students are warehoused into becoming thoughtless,
slavish consumers? I’d love to hear Noam Chomsky’s defensiveness,
comments(excuse s?)on this!

+7 # WestWinds 2014-03-01 21:20
Part One of Two:
[quote name=”barbarato dish”] I’ve taught as an adjunct instructor at
various universities, community colleges, etc., and I’ve encountered
tenured faculty who were close to, if not actually, illiterate. I’ve
asked administrators if it is even possible that some professors were
illiterate and they answered. “It’s possible!” How did these, close to
illiterates, even get degrees? Perhaps they were bought at higher ed
diploma mills. DUH!…
— Here in Floriduh, ALEC has gotten into the university system and
this certainly doesn’t bode well. I see it as there has been a master
plan to destroy every major system out there that We, the People rely
on. George W. Bush even said, “It will take time to restore chaos,” and
I don’t believe he was kidding.
Just before my mother received her D.Ed. from Columbia Univ., in NYC,
she was pulled aside and made to take a writing exam. When she
questioned it, she was told that Columbia was receiving too many
complaints from employers that people with graduate degrees could not
read or write properly. And the first thing I ran into at an academic
convocation at the private college I attended was a speech by the
president of the college stating that no matter what discipline you were
in, if you could not pass the English classes and guided senior thesis,
you would not be allowed to graduate. She was livid stating complaints
abound re the falling performance of graduated students at all levels in
this country.
Cont’d

+6 # WestWinds 2014-03-01 21:23
Part Two of Two:
— I can remember when John Lennon gave his first US interview. I
remember thinking that this young man from Liverpool with an art
education was better educated than our college graduates.
— I remember listening to Randi Rhodes talking about having asked
major corporations why they didn’t come to Florida since the weather is
good with lots of people looking for jobs. She was told the reason was
bc native Floridians were so poorly educated they made terrible workers.
Personally, I only partly believe this to be the reason. I retired here
about a decade ago, and during this time, I have experienced more
criminal behavior than all of the other places I have lived in the
world; from Helsinki to Honolulu. The trades people here are cradle to
grave, generational, line bred criminals functioning under the guise of
ethnic/politica l/religious or other ideologues, (which the police fully
entertain; and according to my mother who lived in Florida as a child,
always have.)
It really all comes back to follow the money. The schools have been
savaged just like the judiciary and the medical profession, all in the
name of the Golden Calf of profits. We’ve allowed them to commandeer our
souls and we really need to stop this.

+9 # WestWinds 2014-03-01 20:53
When I look at all of the craziness that is coming out of these people
being perpetrated on us, I fairly die with despair. But the good news is
that they are going to eventually destroy themselves. Why? Because
destroy is all that they know how to do. They are SO out of contact with
humanity and reality that in time the backlash will come. I just hope it
gets here before I die of old age. I really DETEST these people and
their sick crazy minds. Let’s have an Enlightenment Renaissance so I can
feel human again!

+5 # barbaratodish 2014-03-01 22:30
It may be unbelievable, but it’s true that higher education in the US is
so bad that even some law schools now provide REMEDIAL READING AND
WRITING! If LAW is really F/LAW right now, what will F/LAW become in the
future? We need to start with giving ourselves PRIMAL LAW (and PRIMAL
HUMOR TOO) before it is too late! lmao

+5 # Dion Giles 2014-03-02 00:14
The demise of university education in America, described here by Noam
Chomsky, is driven globally by collusion in many countries, including
among others Australia which I have had the opportunity to observe
closely as it has been unrolled. The key to this anti-intellectu al
Revolt Against Reason is the ascendance of the managerialist class (the
same class that resisted the Enlightenment and which strangled the
Soviet revolution in the pre-1917 planning stages). A ball-to-ball
account of the Australian phase from go to woe is available as a
free-to-downloa d book, “Australian Universities: A Portrait of Decline”
by scientist Dr Donald Meyers, at
http://www.australianuniversities.id.au/ .
It should be noted that the attack on education extends through the
phases down to and including pre-primary and up to and including
political discourse – something to which Professor Chomsky in particular
has drawn attention.

-13 # DeadlyClear 2014-03-02 01:35
I’ve watched the decline in the quality of education since the 1960s.
Discipline was replaced by an acceptable growing drug culture. Not just
students but also teachers and professionals.. . Not just in one state –
but throughout America.
I see kids that think pot helps them focus throughout their day claiming
it to be medicinal and mixing it with “Monster” drinks to stay awake.
This self-medicating is where we are losing in academia. Mix it with the
“me” generation – with no forethought about experimenting with drugs and
what it is doing to future generations and you have the recipe for
educational decay.
They aren’t taught how to focus without the use or drugs. As I told 3
unemployed college educated young adults recently, “if pot were a remedy
– with the volume you all smoke, you’d for sure be cured by now.” They
just laughed and took their EBT cards to the store to buy more Monsters.
We don’t teach these kids how to focus and we no longer discipline them
when they failed to show respect. The problems are basic – not esoteric.

0 # Susan1989 2014-03-02 06:01
It seems as though most young people consider college to be a place to
party. I am an adult/senior citizen attending a small college in NYC. I
have noticed while studying in the library that a large number of
student require head phones with music while studying…mumb le to
themselves while writing a paper…or just cannot seem to remain quiet
or concentrate. Teachers end classes early…and if they don’t…student
s leave early.

+3 # goodsensecynic 2014-03-02 04:30
Welcome to K-mart Kollege!
Here we have exchanged Associate professors for Walmart Associates.
The only faint hope remaining (since even the Democrats endorse the
corporate model as applied in the elementary and secondary schools by
Arne Duncan and promoted by computer huckster Bill Gares) is for the
mass unionization of the professoriat.
Yet, either because they are delusional and think themselves to be
“professionals” in the same sense as physicians and lawyers and not
employees like carpenters and miners, or because they are witting
collaborators with the plutocracy, there is a slate of candidates being
vigorously encouraged to take over the AAUP because the national
organization of professors is addressing the foundational issues that
define the problem of higher education.
The T-partification of scholars and teachers must be stopped.