Better benefits for faculty would mean higher tuition for students, making it even harder for young persons to afford college. That seems counterproductive to your goal of educating human beings. Cheap adjuncts keeps costs of education down. Or what you meant to say is you want low tuition AND tenured positions for all faculty members paid for by taxes on the evil 1%. What else would you like on your Christmas list?
Or they could, you know, not have $5 million/year football coaches (Alabama-Nick Saban, for example). Also, most universities have had cuts in their state funding since the early 1980's, so they receive less government money. Universities make money, and what they spend it on varies greatly. The majority of them could spend more money on professors without raising tuition, but instead are spending it on increasing their administration staff instead of their faculty. <a class="postlink" href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-samuels/why-tuition-always-goes-u_b_462906.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-samue ... 62906.html</a> <a class="postlink" href="http://www.aei.org/article/education/higher-education/where-does-all-that-tuition-go/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.aei.org/article/education/hi ... uition-go/</a>
Cutting administrative staff and sports would reduce costs. But do you want to give that to students in the form of lower tuition? Or give it faculty in the form of job security (tenure), wages, and benefits? My point still stands. Suapyg didn't say the quality of professors is suffering because of low wages. He just seems irked that poor young faculty have to suffer lower wages than they might have hoped for when they were bright-eyed graduate students. Keeping the cheap adjunct faculty. + Ditching the bloated administration. = Lowest possible tuition. (Students win!)
If by win you mean trade cheaper tuition for worse education. The average recent grad does not have the depth of knowledge of the average professor.
I support lower pay for professors because I was taught by low paid teachers myself, so I must be too uneducated to know any better. Glad you cleared that up. See, I foolishly thought you'd have something substantive to say. Instead you chose to insult me. But I feel better knowing that so many of the young faculty you know and care for are suffering under the fear of losing their meager salary or suffering a serious illness without adequate health insurance. You can be a prick all you want and you won't be able to change a damn thing.
Not really sure how the whole pizza is a vegetable thing worked its way in here, but it's pretty much bullshit. tl;dr- Obama wanted to up the volume of tomato paste required to count as a serving of vegetables, he got shot down, nothing changed.
I'm sorry, I'm trying to wrap my head around this, but I have no idea what you're trying to say here. The average recent grad has done a bachelor's degree and after school has probably not done a whole lot extra learning in their field. The average professor has a bachelor's degree, possibly a master's, and a PhD, and has spent a decade or two teaching and researching in that field. Of fucking course the average professor knows more than an average recent grad.
Something tells me that perhaps UT Austin football might not be a representative example for college in general. Specifically, the article you linked tells me this. So 98 of the 120 FBS schools failed to break even on athletics. But yes, citing the Nick Saban's of the world is probably not the best strategy, since the truly top-tier programs (and thus, the ones w/ giant coaching contracts) tend to make money. I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt, and assume that he is saying that the average full faculty member (i.e. associate, assistant, or full professor) has a significantly greater knowledge base that the recent grad school graduates who he is suggesting would fill the majority of adjunct positions, and that there is a significant educational cost to trading full professors for their teaching-hours equivalent in adjuncts, as many universities are doing.
Well that makes a lot more sense. And to add on to the point of hiring faculty, although adjunct professors can be a good thing (in that they usually have real experience in their fields, among other things) you still need core, full-time faculty members to make a school run. The only comparison I can think of would be like trying to build a military entirely out of reservists. You need people who are there full-time to design courses, set budgets, attract research dollars, be involved with student life, etc. When all of your professors are only on campus for four hours per week for teaching and the rest of their time is spent running a department at their real jobs, well, some things start to suffer. Profs have plenty of duties outside of just giving lectures and marking exams.
An excerpt from this: <a class="postlink" href="http://nymag.com/print/?/news/politics/conservatives-david-frum-2011-11/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://nymag.com/print/?/news/politics/ ... m-2011-11/</a> hit me as important. "The billionaires do exist, and some do indeed attempt to influence the political process. The bizarre fiasco of campaign-finance reform has perversely empowered them to give unlimited funds anonymously to special entities that can spend limitlessly. (Thanks, Senator McCain! Nice job, Senator Feingold!) Yet, for the most part, these Republican billionaires are not acting cynically. They watch Fox News too, and they’re gripped by the same apocalyptic fears as the Republican base. In funding the tea-party movement, they are actually acting against their own longer-term interests, for it is the richest who have the most interest in political stability, which depends upon broad societal agreement that the existing distribution of rewards is fair and reasonable. If the social order comes to seem unjust to large numbers of people, what happens next will make Occupy Wall Street look like a street fair."
<a class="postlink" href="http://xkcd.com/980" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://xkcd.com/980</a> - monstrously large visualization of financial reality in the US.
<a class="postlink" href="http://99percenters.tumblr.com/post/13143919856/miscarriage-at-occupy" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://99percenters.tumblr.com/post/131 ... -at-occupy</a> The pregnant woman pepper-sprayed by police has had a miscarriage, supposedly due to getting pepper-sprayed by police. I'm curious if this is something that can be demonstrated medically, or if she's making claims on a tremendous future lawsuit.
Just to clarify, the claim she's making is that she was struck in the stomach twice by officers before being pepper sprayed.
All sorts of shit can cause a miscarriage, and while I wouldn't think the chemical reaction of pepper spray itself would necessarily trigger a miscarriage, it's not unreasonable to believe that the trauma of being pepper sprayed even without the strikes to the stomach could cause such an event. That said, I wouldn't really fault the police for pepper spraying a protester who needed to be pepper sprayed, who happened to be pregnant. I can imagine lots of circumstances in a protest where the cop wouldn't be an awful human being, and a pregnant protester might get pepper sprayed. I'm having a hard time coming up with a situation where the police strike the pregnant lady twice in the stomach and then pepper spray her, where the cop shouldn't lose his badge and possibly be lynched in jail.
I wish I could say this surprises me, but it doesn't: Wells Fargo employees and others say they were punished for finding fraud by mortgage originators, since it hurt the bank's mortgage securitization business. Keep in mind that within the finance industry, Wells Fargo is widely regarded as being amongst the least dishonest, predatory, or reckless of the major banks. This is what happens when you have a system that rewards quantity of commodification rather than underlying quality.
I was part of the "Refi Ramp-Up" last year at Wells Fargo Home Mortgage, and that article is absolutely correct. Management at WF will sacrifice anything and anyone for short-term shareholder value. The part where the author mentions that internal employees weren't allowed to use the ethics hotline anymore? It actually happened, and not just to the ethics line. There are a couple of different numbers that we were told to use when the problems "escalated" beyond our ability/responsibility/permission to resolve. Around November or so of last year, all of the 'Executive Complaint Lines' were so overwhelmed that a memo came down from the very top saying that no more escalations were allowed; you were required to take care of it yourself. In theory that sounds great, but we didn't have the authority to do jack shit. Example: a borrower has a refinance in progress and has the rate locked in for 90 days (usually it's only 60 days). Due to the volume of loans going through the system at once, quite often loans would go past the rate expiration date, and either they would need to reapply at the new market rate - or pay a rate extension fee (.00125 of the loan amount per week past the expiration). Every level of management at Wells was held accountable to how many were past expiration, and we were told to either "close them or get rid of them". It didn't matter that it was entirely WF's fault that a loan in process has taken longer than 90 days, most managers refused to soak the cost of a rate extension in order to allow underwriting enough time to close the loan. The regulation side of the story is that Well's couldn't simply 'stop' a loan; they had to have a legitimate reason for it, and the rate expiring wasn't good enough. So management came down hard on underwriting to find any and all excuses to 'deny' an otherwise legitimate loan just because it was taking too long and showing up on their morning reports. The other loans that were just difficult and clogging the processing and underwriting pipeline? People would call and complain to us; after our managers stopped taking escalations we would just forward them on to the executive complaint line. Once that number was disconnected and changed and the memo came down to stop using it, we were the only contact left at WF that these borrowers could get ahold of. Most of us processors just stopped answering the phone and would only return calls. Soooooo many stories about how shady of a place that is...institutionally rotten, all the way through. When I get a mortgage, it will be from a local credit union that won't resell it - I'm sure I won't get the best rate, but it'll still be worth it.