How do you understand your own disillusionment?

I understand my own deep feelings of disillusionment and hopelessness when it comes to the student lending crisis and how the problem fits into a broader context  - I am well-acquainted and even comfortable with these patterns of thoughts now. The frequency of these thoughts ebb and flow.  However, I'd like to hear from you. How do you understand your own disillusionment as an indentured educated servant? How does it crop up in your everyday life? 

 

Alan Nasser (Part III)

Part III of my conversation with Alan Nasser about capitalism, the Obama administration, U.S. democracy, student loan debt, and so forth. 


If you haven't read Part I or Part II, I encourage you to do so before reading the next installment below. 



CCJ: Speaking of appealing to regular people, you write a lot for publications like CommonDreams.org and Counterpunch.org. Could you tell us why that is? 

AN: I've mostly quit writing for professional journals. I want to talk in plain, direct English, and I try to do that.

CCJ: You do a great job of that.

AN: Well thank you. So, that is why I write for Commondreams and Counterpunch. I want to reach more people. Education is a task that is very important. It's overwhelming. For instance, I know that in public schools, they still promote anti-communism, portraying preposterous depictions of what communism is supposed to be. And the Soviet and Chinese 'threats' don’t even exist any more! I don't think they do much better with fascism. History is not a well-taught discipline.

CCJ: I know that all too well! Your comment also reminds me of the way in which Obama is portrayed with a red flag behind him, which is obviously a Communist flag, and then has a Hitler mustache slapped on his face. I have news for these people: Fascists hated Communists. They were the first to be put in camps by the Nazis. But let’s move away from how these –isms are so poorly and laughably conflated. What do you think of this idea that Obama is a socialist? 

AN: It’s not true. Let’s look at a few things. When it comes to home energy programs, Obama has twice cut back on these programs. So many people die from the cold or from fires, because they can't afford heating. That's another way I see this administration engaged on a frontal assault on the most vulnerable people. They are cutting aid to the disabled. But why bother providing energy assistance to people who are of no use to the vested interests, whether it is at the ballot box or in terms of campaign contributions? And perhaps most ominously, Obama stacked his Deficit Commission with people who have made a career of working to reduce or privatize Social Security. He now wants people to work longer for lower benefits.

CCJ: Yes. That’s quite troubling. Let’s talk about a group now that actually helped President Obama win the election. Well, at least a portion of them (those who are between the ages of 18 - 24+). You are obviously interested in the student loan issue. I call it a student loan debt crisis. How does this relate to the broader problems of the economic crisis that many Americans, and most people around the world, are still experiencing today? 


AN: I think at one basic level it fits in with the economy de-industrializing not completely of course, but substantially.  The economy has become increasingly financialized, leaving less and less real and productive activity. You and I both grew up seeing those familiar pictures of presidents surrounded by his advisory entourage. They were mostly CEOs from Ford, US Steel, General Motors, Alcoa, that is, those sorts of industrialists. Now you see the same the pictures, and there might be an industrialist or two in that entourage, but the majority of them are finance capitalists and generals. I think that you know that America is turning into an economy in which the principal thing sold is not widgets but debt. That’s what banks do: they sell debt. Debt is becoming the principal product sold in the U.S. Student debt is a big component of that total debt. Defaults on student loans far exceed those on any other types of loan. The student borrower is saddled with debt for a longer stretch of their life than those with home mortgage loans.

The burden of student loans is not infrequently a lifetime burden. Student debt is taking a terrible toll on people. The victims of the collapse of the housing market won’t be as oppressively burdened for as long a time as student debtors will be. This is consistent with the typical wage earner becoming a permanent debtor.

The impact of the assault on the public sector and public sector workers hit state and local governments as well as public colleges. Public colleges have been forced to drive up their tuition. Over-enrollment is forcing students into schools that are even higher tuition costs just in order to get that college degree, a degree that is becoming worth less and less. According to the most recent projections from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, most future jobs will not require a college education. Most of those jobs will also be low-paying. The general trend in industry is to both reduce and de-skill the labor force. The economic crisis, which really began in 2006, and was evident in 2008, hit the public sector very hard. Over-enrollment and an increased rush to other alternatives really set in the fall of 2008, so it stands to reason that for- profits would proliferate.

CCJ: I have to say, I have only been gone from the U.S. for 11 months, but I have been shocked by how many for-profit schools I’ve seen here. When I returned from South Korea in late December of 2010, I drove from Los Angeles, California to Dallas, TX. I was also in Washington, D.C. in mid-January. I am speaking to you from downtown Chicago. In all of these places in the country, there seemed to be a for-profit school is practically on every block. Downtown Chicago is filled with them, and I mean on every block. I realize that might be anecdotal, but I’ve been really taken aback. 

AJ: I’ve noticed something similar. I’m from NYC, and I get back there on a regular basis. In the last 2 years I’ve noticed a change on the subway. The advertisements for these schools are just everywhere!

CCJ: I have noticed the same thing here in Chicago when taking public transportation, too. It’s disturbing. 

AJ: Being away puts you at an advantage. Changes that others might not notice will strike you.

CCJ: I agree. Speaking more about the for-profits or proprietary schools, there has been a great deal of scrutiny on the for-profits or proprietary schools lately. Do you feel that they are a bigger problem than the non-profits?

AN: The Department of Education is looming now as a more serious problem, because the Department is the biggest student lender. Moreover, the department is raking it in with defaults – they recover 120% of every defaulted loan. And they know that the default rates they've backed are between 25% - 40%. They are not warning people about this. They aren't doing credit checks. The department is making a killing, so I think I'd like to see people focus on that, without losing sight of the for-profit issue. It is just as salient, but I think the Department is looming very large as a real predator, a really horrible predator. That’s something we should pay attention to and not allow the for-profits to distract us from this. After I wrote about student loans, so many people wrote to me. I felt that I needed to respond in some way, and, as you know, the horror stories are astounding. Garnishing disability payments and their tax refunds? It's stunning. It's horrific. I don't know how these poor folks . . . what they are going to do. A lot of people who have signed off on loans, for their sons and daughters, nephews and nieces, never suspected that the debt would be compounded and compounded.

It’s really a whole new kind of misery.

Woodward Avenue Presbyterian Church, built in the Gothic revival style in 1911. Photograph from the collection, "Detroit In Ruins," by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre. Special thanks to Mr. Marchand and Mr. Meffre for agreeing to let me use their photographs for these next installments of my conversation with Alan. 

Conversations That Matter: Alan Nasser (Part II)

Since I've already made introductory remarks about my engaging conversation with Alan Nasser, I'd like to immediately launch into the second part of our talk. (You can read the first part here). 


CCJ: In 2009, you argued that New Deal Liberalism had written its obituary. In this piece you assert that Obama is a new type of Democrat. Ominously you wrote, "[Obama] means Business. Working people, take cover." Are there any policies of the current administration that indicate they are concerned about working people?

AN: We all like balance. I'd like to say that there are some things he’s doing for working people, but there are so many more anti-working-class policies. I don't see a single thing in this administration's agenda that is designed to benefit working people.

CCJ: Agreed.

 AN: If you take a look at the most recent developments, specifically the Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, the head of that council is Jeffrey Immelt, who is the CEO of GE . Immelt is an ardent outsourcer. GE employs more people overseas than in the U.S. In the last ten years GE has closed 29 plants, eliminated ten thousand jobs, and created thirty-thousand in India.

In 2002, Immelt gave a speech to his investors and said, 'I am a China-nut. When I meet people I say, ‘China, China, China, China, China.’ This is where it's cost effective.'

The guy is an outsourcer and this is the guy Obama appointed to be head of Council on Jobs and Competitiveness?

CCJ: It’s problematic to say the least.

AN:  The name [of the council] also bears reflection. It’s this idea that the goal of job creation is not so much to provide working people with a decent living, but rather to promote jobs in industries targeted for export-oriented growth. [Obama’s] principal aim, his macroeconomic aim in shaping economic policy, focuses on investments and exports. We want to become competitive like we were during the Golden Age by becoming exporters. He seems unaware that we were the world’s major industrial exporter in ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s because we monopolized world markets. However Europe eventually re-industrialized after World War II and became a formidable competitor, and we now have a similar situation in Asia. So the U.S. will never be a dominant exporter in the way that it used to be. Even worse, if you focus on exports, you are going to be driving wages down. Our competitors have a system based on low wages. Since there is now, for the first time in history, a global labor market, international competition will drive wages in high-wage countries down towards the level of wages in low-wage countries. We've already seen that happen. For instance, the median wage has been declining since 1973. 38 years of stagnant or declining wages – that’s astonishing. Economics 101 tells you that can’t happen. What does that tell you about mainstream economics?

I want to get a little deeper into the logic of this. Obama sees the job issue as subordinate to the export issue, and there is a causal chain. If you want to promote exports, you have to increase investments. How do you do that? We know how Obama does that, you cut corporate taxes. The next link in the causal chain is that by cutting taxes on the rich you increase the deficit. When you increase the deficit, you then have a pretext to cutting social programs. It's not apparent on the surface, but an export economy is where public spending is slashed.

Another relevant point in this connection is that some time in 2010, President Obama gave a speech where he said, 'I've never believed it was government’s  purpose to create jobs. Job creation has to happen in private sector.' Obama is a free-market libertarian.

These policy changes suggest we're living in such radically different times, and this requires that we change the way we think about progressives and progressive ideas. Mainstream liberals like Paul Krugman and Robert Reich call for an increase in government spending and aggregate demand. That’s not a Keynesian position. For Keynes it was not about aggregate demand or output but effective demand. That means it was about increasing jobs, not merely increasing output. Increasing output won’t necessarily have any effect on jobs. Keynes was a believer that ultimately you have to have government directly providing a stimulus for working people, and the point he made – and no one talks about this, and I think it’s important – is that government should provide direct aid where it is needed, not indirect aid by, e.g. reducing corporate taxes to stimulate hiring, or recapitalizing banks to stimulate lending, which we see now has failed. The way Keynesian policy has been taken up is to only provide jobs during recession. That’s not what Keynes argued. Policymakers think that it should be done during a recession, but Keynes thought it should be done during recessions and expansionary periods, because unemployment persists even during economic expansions.

 So it’s not very helpful to think that there is 'too much unemployment,' but rather be more specific [that’s according to Keynes]. There are specific cities, states, regions where unemployment is a serious problem, and other places where it isn’t. So government should specifically target jobs by providing employment at these specific [geographical locations]. It seems like you would say, 'of course,' but when you read Krugman and others, they’re into what the British economist Joan Robinson called bastard Keynesianism. That is the kind [of Keynesianism] that has been adopted by U.S. policymakers, and it is a distortion of Keynes's thought.

CCJ:  I'd like to stay on this topic of working people. I've noticed that the SEIU has been promoting and arguing in support of 'middle class workers' Correct me if I'm wrong, but that seems to be another way in which working class people have been 'erased' from the public discourse. Do you agree? 

AN: Of all the questions you asked so far, this has to be my favorite one. Furthermore, of all the questions, this one is the most significant. You could go on endlessly, too. I think you’re right in asking it, and I think I know why.

CCJ: Well, it seems to me that the working class and the poor are no longer being discussed.

AN: I am very troubled by the usage of the term middle class. Of course [the term] suggests that there is a class above and a class below. Americans are very angry at what the rich are carrying off and what they've been able to carry off. They're doing better now than they ever have in American history. But what about that other class? If there is a middle, logically, there has to be at least two others. There has also been a significant change in the rhetoric of the Democratic party. As you know, they used to call themselves the party of the working class, but they don't call themselves that anymore. It's as if [working class people] don't exist. Maybe they don't vote, so they don't carry much weight. They can't donate money, so they are no use to the elites. The rich say: 'we don't care about them. It's the middle class who goes out there stumping.'

The earnings of a typical wage earner is far lower than you'd think. These [wage earners] have in fact been marginalized. They are not constituents of the Democratic party. They are not a constituency of any party, except maybe that of a marginalized party. Parties that the press will acknowledge . . . well . . .  the working class might well as not exist.

CCJ: To continue on this topic of the poor and working class. What does this mean then, this sanitizing of the poor and the working class from political discourse? What are the ramifications?

AN: The ramifications are the forces and tendencies that I outlined in the longer article that I sent to you that are leading towards rendering the majority of the population into permanently indentured debt peons. There is something dramatic happening, and that is the majority of wage earners will be consigned to an even lower standard of living, lower wages, and debt peonage. They are going to be ignored, and they will not be discussed in the media.

At the same time you hear how we need to pay attention to middle class, even though the media admits that the middle class is shrinking. Robert Reich makes a very big deal about this thing. He is not alone. Others like the Center for American Progress, Dean Baker, and Robert Kuttner – the best social democrat out there – all have very detailed explanations about the disappearance of the middleclass.

CCJ: Of course. I’ve argued that if the middleclass isn’t extinct already, it’s fast heading that way and ought to be considered endangered. And I guess that’s similar to what these folks are talking about.

AN: Yes, and all of them talk about the declining middleclass. OK, but where are they going? Some other class – the increasingly impoverished working class – might be getting bigger. But that's not talked about! There was this great song that came out in the 1930s. It was called “Remember The Forgotten Man,” and the working class is now a part of that. It has become that forgotten class. It’s disregarded. It is treated like an appendix! It is an appendage that is there, but who cares about it? It doesn’t matter. The result of this, if I am right, is that the working class is becoming increasingly impoverished and larger. It is less an object of policy and political concern. People, however, will not sit there like bumps on a log. I see this larger class becoming part of a new form of resistance. But I also foresee that there will be more domestic violence, more crime, and more suicide. That always happens when economic insecurity increases. That is why I think progressives need to be looking at ways we can organize the poor and the working class. First, and you’ll understand this well, people need to be educated. They need to understand how the economic system works, how it grows in stages, and why it fizzles out at some point.

CCJ: And of course you’re speaking specifically about the stages of capitalism, correct?

AN: Yes. So, people need to understand how it works. Economic systems have come to an end many times throughout the course of history. Then there is something very new and different that needs to be born [afterwards]. That’s why it’s important to promote a sense of historical imagination, of greater possibilities whose contours are indicated by the way the current system malfunctions. Liberals have no historical imagination. That is why I can kind of admire Tea Partiers. They have strong beliefs and they act on them. Liberals seem to believe only in letting people do what they want as long as they don’t prevent other people from doing what they want. They seem to have no values.

Regular people need to know that there are greater possibilities. We need a correct diagnosis of our society. That will point us to a better future and help us understand what it will look like. That is a Marxist position, but I think it can be defended. If someone criticizes me for that, I can say, 'What’s your suggestion then?'

CCJ: How do you feel people think about socialism versus capitalism? 

AN: I noticed that the Rasmussen poll showed that the majority of people say they prefer socialism to capitalism. But I think that what they meant was that they prefer Obama to his far-right critics who call his policies “socialist.” Of course Obama is as far from democratic socialism as you can get. To my mind, Cryn, a major task at this point is for people who see democratic socialism as both possible and desirable to explain to their interlocutors exactly what democratic socialism is. Hardly anyone in the US, including the intellectual class, knows what democratic socialism means.

Alan Nasser is professor emeritus of political economy at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington.

To Reform Tenure, Consider Breaking Confidentiality: A Novel Approach

Following our discovery that Brown University is proposing to extend the tenure clock for probationary faculty to eight years, we learn that the University of Michigan is considering a similar move.  The Senate Advisory Committee on University Affairs (SACUA) is, according to the Michigan Daily,  considering extending the maximum probationary period.  Currently it is eight years, and SACUA is proposing an optional ten year clock.  Additional items on the table included weighting the decision more heavily towards faculty evaluations of the candidate.

In a proposal that appears, on the face of it, to be driven by concerns in the sciences and at the medical school, Professor of Statistics Ed Rothman told the Daily that:

this is only a short-term solution to a larger, long-term problem — ill-defined standards for obtaining tenure. Rothman said externally generated standards, like publishing requirements for faculty members, diminish quality of work. He said tenure should be determined by internally generated standards like peer reviews of faculty members’ performances.

“Long-term, I think what we need to do is come up with a standard that we have control over,” Rothman said.

He added that since faculty members have no control over fluctuations in the economy, tenure shouldn’t be determined by economically-driven factors such as obtaining research grants or publishing materials.

One similarity with Brown's approach to tenure reform seems to be recognizing the effect of the economy on the traditional markers that signal professional achievement.  Racking up numbers -- grants, books and articles -- are virtually the only indication untenured faculty have that they are making material progress towards a positive tenure vote.  We urge them to think this way, in part because publishing demonstrates a broader recognition that this person's work is significant to others outside our own little world.

One problem with this, however, is that numbers only provide the frame for a decision, whereas probationary faculty tend to think it is the whole ball of wax. In tenure decisions, no one talks about numbers for more than a second or two.  It is what people think of the quality of the work that is crucial.  Very often other things matter too:  did this person write a prize-winning book, but do so at the expense of showing up for class irregularly and unprepared?  Ideally, a tenure decision not only grants a guaranteed seat at the scholarly table for past achievement, but also recognizes that there will be future promise that justifies that person's employment over three decades or so.  In other words, in any field, tenure is an opportunity, not a reward.  It grants access to important and increasingly scarce resources:  a positive tenure vote is a vote of confidence that this person is going to use this opportunity well over the course of a career.

In this sense, an extended clock recognizes that not all people can demonstrate their promise adequately in the same time frame, and that life circumstances can intervene to prevent that. In this sense, the Michigan and Brown reforms should be applauded.  But I wonder if giving departmental faculty more power over tenure is, in the absence of other reforms, a truly benign development.  Depending on the dynamic of the individual department, it does not necessarily mean that those with the best knowledge in the candidates field of study will actually have the most influence over the decision.  In fact, it is not unknown for faculty who are hostile to particular fields and specialties within the department, or who associate certain methods and subject matters with political positions to which they are hostile, will acquire more influence than they have already without any guarantee that the decision will be more fair.

What seems to me to be a a genuinely useful direction for tenure reform -- one that would make these other reforms more meaningful -- would be to dismantle the sacred cow of confidentiality.  It is an ancient belief that secrecy in these procedures makes honest evaluations more likely, but we know that this is not true.  Mean people write mean letters about good people; generous people write "do no harm" letters about mediocre scholarship that allows a department to tenure for its own reasons and not have to overcome a bad letter in the process.  Myself, I never write a tenure letter that expresses criticisms in a tone I could not imagine the candidate reading, and I never say anything in a meeting that I don't imagine the candidate hearing.  Indeed, even in the case of a positive decision, leaks in the meeting develop almost immediately, metastasizing into gossip about who voted in which way and why.

So, why are tenure procedures confidential?  To protect the university from legal action, that's why.  A secondary concern is that the faculty making the decision would prefer to have some control over their own images, prefer not to be known for taking negative stances on a case even if they believe they have voted correctly, and are fully capable of re-crafting their own positions following a negative decision to distance themselves from the damage.  Doing someone dirty in a confidential atmosphere, even if what you are saying is true and supported by evidence, permits faculty to control the process in a way that may do structural damage to the community in the long run.

Therefore, in my view, any real tenure reform has to address the problem of high-stakes evaluations that are done in private.  Secrecy actually permits institutional inequality to thrive, because no one ever "sees" it; alternatively, it allows a larger, skeptical public to believe that a negative tenure decision might be an outcome of prejudice when in fact it has resulted from an honest evaluation of the case.  Breaking confidentiality not only forces people to explain why they believe what they believe, it also creates a far more textured picture than probationary faculty currently have of why some people are tenured and some people are not.All of these things are bad for faculty morale over the long term, and they are bad for how a larger public views the tenure system. 

• Making all materials in a tenure case available to the candidate. 
• Allowing the candidate to respond to questions about hir scholarship that have arisen in the letters and in the departmental discussion.
• Making minority and majority opinions on each case available in some kind of public document.
• Allowing all departmental faculty who have voted in the case to identify themselves to the candidate and explain why they voted the way they did.

Breaking confidentiality would have a generative role in positive tenure cases too, since positive decisions are sometimes weighted down with the baggage of negative votes that have been successfully overcome.  These negative votes not infrequently arise from critiques that, although they were not sustained by the majority decision, should not be allowed to disappear either.  Candidates inevitably hear rumors about them, but are justified in not taking them seriously because they are conveyed (often inaccurately) by their "friends" and have been articulated by "enemies." Flaws in scholarship that are not fatal at the level of the monograph might have serious ramifications down the road if they are not addressed, while originality and risk-taking that has been deliberately muted in pre-tenure scholarship so as not to offend could be usefully cultivated in the post-tenure years.

Will there be a "Wikitenure" scandal down the road?  My guess is yes.  But let's think about the possibility of breaking confidentiality in a more positive light.  What could openness in tenure decisions, that made them more like evaluations done in non-scholarly fields, do to improve the process?  How could it educate young scholars better to what we expect of them, and how they will be asked to function as senior members of the faculty?  How might those who perceive personnel cases as part of an ongoing, factional struggle within departments be marginalized in favor of those who want to see departments grow in a healthy way? Could that intervene in decades-long grudge matches that create a toxicity for the newly tenured to manage?

And might it make probationary faculty feel, even when they are disappointed in a decision, that they had an opportunity to be heard in the process of deciding their own futures?

A Brief Exchange From My Dream Life Where I Address Some Confusion On The Political Right

Rush Limbaugh (hysterically):  "The decision not to defend Roe v. Wade by a corrupt attorney general is another instance of a criminal administration!  What if Obama decided to stop defending Roe v. Wade?  How would the liberals like that?"

Tenured Radical (with unnerving calm):  "Supreme Court decisions and litigation are two entirely different things, Fat Stuff.  Under the constitution, the President and the Department of Justice don't defend Supreme Court decisions, only laws that are defensible under the Constitution. No one  outside the Court, except radio personalities and issue-based non-profits, actually 'defends' Supreme Court decisions, and those defenses are either purely rhetorical or based in fund-raising appeals and organizing.  Instead, precedents are upheld, or not upheld by the court in response to new litigation, based on dissents and concurrences articulated and written by members of the Court.  You f&#king nitwit."



Hat tip.

Conversations That Matter: Alan Nasser (Part I)

Last week, after I wrapped up a long day of writing and researching for EduLender, I returned to my hotel room to do more work for them and then eventually turned to AEM tasks. It was hardly a task when I called up Alan Nasser, however. We  had a long conversation, even though he was under the weather, and he shared his views on student loan debt and how it fits into the bigger picture related to our current economic system, that of capitalism. Alan is a thrilling person to talk to, and I want to thank him publicly for such a lively and engaging conversation.  It is my hope that this conversation will be the first of many more between the two of us. 


Since the talk was quite lengthy and we talked about complex topics like capitalism, Keynesian economic policy, the Obama Administration, U.S. public intellectuals, etc., etc., the conversation will be posted in a series. 


Let's hear what Alan has to say about our current state of affairs.


CCJ: I realize the question is broad, but please tell us a little bit about your work and what you're currently investigating. While many of AEM's readers know who you are, I'd like to allow you to discuss your research and so forth.

AN: Right now I am finishing an article called “NeoLiberalism As First and Last Resort” for a journal called State of Nature. It is about the general historical trajectory of American capitalism, which began roughly in 1823 to the present. I'm also looking at the four depressions in the U.S., including this current one. This is not a recession, it's a depression. I'm finding a pattern and certain lessons to be learned, and how they are responded to [by policymakers]. We need to correct the conditions that led to the current depression. The cause of course is capitalism. By that I mean that capitalism’s confining democratic decision-making to the political sphere only, and not to the economic, makes it so that investment decisions - and the investment decision is where it all starts - are made with the sole purpose of generating profits ad infinitum. Well, unlimited profit-making is impossible, and that’s where the cumulative instability begins. Capitalism must be understood as a dynamic system, and is probably the most unstable institution created by humans. I'm looking at how that all stands today, and where we’re going from here.


CCJ: If capitalism is dynamic, is that a good thing? What’s happening to it at this point in history?

AN: It looks as if dynamic capitalism is fizzling out. The Western countries have all become de-industrialized, and the dynamism is shifting to Asia and the BRIC countries. They will go through the same trajectory as Western countries because they too will aim at the impossible goal of unlimited growth. Perpetual growth is not possible. The requirement of growth in widgets, profits, expanding markets into perpetuity, all those things are what capitalism requires. That's impossible. I use a term that economists used to use all the time, but it has fallen out of fashion since the end of World II. It’s the notion of maturity. Once a capitalist economy has accomplished industrialization, reached maturity, further growth can only be artificially induced - e.g. by injecting the economy with an overdose of credit - at the expense of working people. I begin my new book [which hasn't been published yet], The “New Normal:” Capitalist Austerity and the Decline of American Democracy, with a quote by Sir Peter Medawar:

We have now grown used to the idea that most ordinary or natural growth processes (the growth of organisms, or populations of organisms or, for example, of cities) is not merely limited, but self-limited, i.e. is slowed down or eventually brought to a standstill as a consequence of the act of growth itself. For one reason or another, but always for some reason, organisms cannot grow indefinitely, just as beyond a certain level of size or density a population defeats its own capacity for further

CCJ: Tell us why you chose this quote by Medawar.

AN: Medawar was a Nobel Laureate. He was a humanist and wrote on a whole range of topics. He wrote about individuals as organisms which reach maturity, after which further growth is not possible. The growth of an organism is limited by the same forces that propel its growth in the first place. The same is true with populations, cities, and so forth, and is also true with capitalism. So my work on capitalism is based upon these questions: what limits its growth, i.e. what is it that makes unending economic growth impossible? What’s the process that led the U.S. to the point that our future is a permanently indebted workforce? Of course, I've enjoyed all the benefits of capitalism. I grew up during what economists now call the ‘Golden Age’, the period from 1949 to 1973, the longest period of sustained expansion in the history of capitalism. My students, on the other hand, are going to live in a different world.


CCJ: What are some other questions that drive your research?

AN: What are the dynamics that underlie and propel this process [of capitalism]? What is it that people can do to arrest this movement toward indefinite austerity in the U.S.? To me, it’s a no-brainer. It’s organized resistance.


Alan Nasser is professor emeritus of political economy at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington.

Abandoned Homes in Detroit

Photograph by Jeff Haynes/Getty Images

Every Little Queer Vote Matters: Reflections On The Demise Of DOMA

"Oh my G-d, he's marrying another man!"

Now that Rahm Emanuel has gone off to work his magic on Chicago, it seems that everyone in the Obama White House has gone a little light in the loafers, as my Dad used to say.  Clinton-era palliatives to the right wing that beat back the gays, while Republicans reorganized to elect a president who would send our money and our jobs abroad, are dropping like flies. First the military's Don't Ask, Don't Tell received a timetable for withdrawal, and yesterday Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the Department of Justice will not defend the Defense of Marriage Act because it is unconstitutional.

In both cases, the Obama administration is holding out an olive branch to liberals who have been in an impatient "show me" mood.  But looked at another way, one of the things we know about conservatives is that they are increasingly less persuaded, as a group, in the moral issues that right-wing strategists use to obscure other fiscal and political agendas.  Abortion is probably the one exception to this, and I can't help but wonder whether the Republican attack on Planned Parenthood -- in many communities the only place where uninsured women of low and middle income brackets have access to birth control, breast cancer screening and gynecological care -- isn't going to come back to bite them in the a$$.

What is interesting to me, looking at a longer historical trajectory, is that Obama's tactics in this regard are quite similar to those used by Jimmy Carter in the first two years of his administration. In 1977, the National Gay Task Force (NGTF)* sent a negotiating team of six men and six women to the White House to negotiate a repeal of an Eisenhower-era ban on gays in government.  The group included luminaries of the left like peace activist and radical lesbian feminist Charlotte Bunch, and was backed by former ACLU Sexual Privacy Project attorney Marilyn Haft, who had gone to work in the Carter administration.

Looking at the archival record, which I have recently for an article that will come out in the Journal of Policy History, you can see two things.  One is that Carter's aides wanted nothing to do with gays, and could have gotten away with that.  Unlike feminists, while GLBT Democrats were organized, they had not yet had a structural impact on the party at the national level.  Carter, however, was persuaded that the moral argument against homosexuality did not preclude a human rights argument on behalf of gays who were excluded from access to many citizenship rights because they were homosexuals.  While the NGTF pressed throughout the administration for the President to take a public stand on gay human rights through an executive order that banned discrimination (legislation originally written by Representatives Ed Koch and Bella Abzug in 1972 is still languishing somewhere on the island of Untouchable Bills), what Carter chose to do was simply stand back and allow the NGTF to persuade Cabinet-level agencies to allow homosexuals to grieve discrimination just like all other citizens were entitled to do.

In this way, a great many barriers to employment fell by eliminating the category of sexual orientation as justification for special discrimination in the federal realm.  This had ramifications beyond government employment, since agencies like the FCC and the Treasury had great power to hear, or not hear, complaints about discrimination that shaped critical areas of American cultural and economic life. That said, the administration did not force agencies to conform to this model, which left the military and the national security apparatus largely untouched. 

Indeed, the similarities between Obama's policies and Carter's are more dramatic the harder you look. Few people not on a GLBT listserve of some kind probably noticed that an out transwoman, Amanda Simpson, was appointed to the Commerce Department in 2010, or that six months later, the State Department lifted the requirement that transpeople have surgery to alter their gender on their passports.  This latter move is incredibly important for the freedom of transfolk to cross borders (and incidentally, to consume airfares and whatnot), but it lifts one form of discrimination while leaving the principle in place that gender identity itself is a border that ought to be complicated and difficult to cross.

Two observations, in closing.  White House statements that Obama's personal views in this matter are separate from his presidential responsibilities demonstrate how far we have not come in the last forty years and how far we have come in the last twenty.  That a president cannot simply come out and say all forms of discrimination, even discrimination against people who disgust you personally, is wrong, demonstrates how the Age of Reagan permanently reshaped political discourse.  And yet, the way that this has happened, much as many mainstream GLBT people would like to be embraced by the President, potentially begins a turn away from neoliberal ideologies that have collapsed the public and private realms since 1988.  A neoliberal himself, Obama has nevertheless re-established some clarity between the realm of personal views and the realm of constitutional, public responsibility has, I  would argue, far broader ramifications for developing the concept of good government than we can perceive around this one issue.  But he is doing so in a way that also sets limits to what can be accomplished, since it stops short of an affirmative statement and affirmative actions that ban all forms of discrimination against GLBT people.

Cross posted at Cliopatria.
___________________________

NGTF became the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force in the mid-1980s, and now often colloquially refers to itself as "The Task Force."

Quick Post: First Piece Is Up On EduTrends

I just wanted to make a quick announcement that my first piece, "Student Debtors in Court: Cautionary Tales," is now up over at EduTrends.

Related Links


"Alan Nasser, Chicago Hotel Hopping, And Joining EduLender"

"Tuition Gift Registry: EduLender Fundraisers"

"What It Means To Build: EduLender, SponsorChange.org, And The David & Goliath Project"

The math lobby makes Obama bang the drum for more math

I am on my way home from Portland, Oregon where I spoke a meeting of teachers interested in technology. I went to Palo Alto before I went to Portland which meant that when President Obama visited Palo Alto and Portland last week I was there too. This mattered because I was blocked on both ends of my trip by the President's entourage. Those things happen -- no big deal.

But what is a big deal is that the President was going on that trip to speak with people about education. And so was I!

Curiously, we were speaking with different folks. Obama was speaking with Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, and the President of Intel. Now, these guys know a lot about business and entrepreneurship and innovation. Education? Not so much. They did go to school. After that, there is no reason to assume they any more about education that anybody else.

Of course, Mr. Obama could use some help with respect to education. He announced yet again the critical need for more math and science, by which he means higher test scores. Why he cares about this I don't know. I guess he thinks maybe we can beat the Chinese in something if we just all study harder in high school and win the math competition. I wonder why he doesn't promote a business competition. I could get my arms around that. Teach kids business -- it might help.

But no, math and science again. He makes it sound like we just don't have enough mathematicians and scientists. There were 10000 applicants to MIT's freshman class last year and they took 1000. So, if anything, we have plenty of kids interested in science but not enough MITs. But the truth is, all the applicants get into some other school that will teach them what they want to know.

And then what will happen? They will become part of the great mass of unemployed, or underemployed, mathematicians and scientists. Really, we have plenty already Mr Obama. Look at the statistics on the number of applicants for each professorial position in these fields.

I don't know what this math and science obsession is really about, but I do have a guess. The testing industry is banging the drum and sending money to push for more testing and as usual, the lobbyists are winning.

Why Do Small Colleges Need Football? And Why This A Radical Question To Ask At Your College

Photo credit.

Last Thursday, Dave Duerson, a four-time Pro Bowl Safety for the Chicago Bears, killed himself.  He was 50 years old, and it seems that Duerson believed that his brain was deteriorating from the effects of multiple concussions.  He chose a particularly painful and risky way to die, shooting himself in the chest, so that an autopsy might be done to determine whether he suffered from chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). As Alan Schwarz wrote for yesterday's New York Times,

Duerson sent text messages to his family before he shot himself specifically requesting that his brain be examined for damage, two people aware of the messages said. Another person close to Duerson, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that Duerson had commented to him in recent months that he might have C.T.E., an incurable disease linked to depression, impaired impulse control and cognitive decline. Members of Duerson’s family declined an interview request through a family friend. 

Only Duerson could have known why he believed he had CTE, and the autopsy will show whether this is true or not. But Duerson's life had begin to fall apart in ways that suggest brain changes.  A clearly vigorous and intelligent man who was active in the player's union, starting in 2005 he lost his business, his home, and his seat on the Notre Dame board of trustees. He also separated from his wife.  These latter facts wouldn't have made him any different from many other unfortunate people who have lost traction in the recent economic meltdown, but Duerson clearly believed that something else was at work: perhaps it was because, amidst the avalanche of bad luck and missteps, was an incident of domestic violence.  Most men I have known who do something violent for a living -- police, soldiers, athletes -- pride themselves on their ability to control and direct their violence, and when this line dissolves it can be shattering to their sense of themselves.

What has been less observable in the daily stumblings, memory gaps and failed impulse control experienced by former football players becomes unavoidable when they commit suicide.  Such events are even more troubling when the victims are young. Take Owen Thomas, a University of Pennsylvania lineman who hanged himself last fall.  Thomas was the second member of the Penn team to kill himself in five years and, according to Boston University researchers, traces of the disease have been found in football players as young as 18.

My friend Margaret Soltan over at University Diaries has carried on a determined crusade against the money spent on university athletic programs, as well as the corruption, exploitation and dangerous behavior that are associated with big time university sports programs.  But who is looking out for small college athletes, and the effects of CTE that they are undoubtedly suffering as well?

No one, that's who.  As Michael Felder wrote last June at the sports blog In The Bleachers,

I'm a 25 year old guy with a history of multiple documented concussions at both the high school and collegiate level. To clarify, the concussions they "documented" were mid to high level injuries that left me being spineboarded once, knocked out a few times and unable to stand up or clearly unable to play others.

That does not count the subtle "bell ringings" experienced and played through during kickoff coverage drills, 9 on 7 sessions or any of the other hitting drills. Everyone does that, it isn't a "tough guy" mentality so much as the cost of doing business.

What about the rest of us?.... The walk-ons, back ups and guys who just weren't lucky enough to make it to the NFL. The guys who got hurt but still took that brain beating on a daily basis prior to injury. Guys who played Division-III, JUCO, Division-II or FCS football.

But you think football is untouchable at the level of the Big Ten or the Patriot League?  Try the Division III school where the quality of the game is often poor, no one goes on to the NFL and you can't even pretend that there is significant money at stake.  At Zenith, for example, no one worries about whether alumni/ae donations will dip because of the elimination of Zonker Harris Day, but if you talk about the dangers of football, you would think you had suggested canceling the next capital campaign.  (Note:  former President of Princeton William Bowen and his co-author Sarah Levin argued in 2001 that there was no significant correlation between athletics and levels of annual giving.)

I know two high-level academic administrators at elite D-III schools who, in the midst of the budget slashing that has affected all of us for the last three years, have been told to cut faculty salaries, administrative staff positions, benefits and whole departments -- but not football.  Admissions policies that committed to grants rather than loans have been scaled back, and even wealthy schools are shaking the trees for more full payers.  However, despite growing evidence that it puts young brains at significant risk and its gajillion dollar pricetag, football is off the table when it comes to eliminating programs.  One of these administrators (not at Zenith) received a personal telephone call from the President and was told s/he was never to discuss eliminating football again in a budget meeting.

Left:  normal 61 year old brain. Right: football player, age 42.

Furthermore, try raising the issue about what, exactly, the D-III football player is at college for, and see how quickly you get shut down.  Well over fifteen years ago, when I was a young pup starting out, one of my advisees on the football team tried to take a seminar on Thoreau from one of the college's most gifted teachers.  He was told by an assistant coach (at the time, coaches vetted players' schedules prior to advisors signing off on them) that "he wasn't smart enough" to take the course, and that he had come to Zenith to play football not to take pansy English classes.  When I called the head coach (naively believing that he would want to reign in an out of control assistant) I received numerous threatening calls from administrators around the university, including a licensed psychotherapist, who asked me pseudo-compassionately:  "Why do you hate football?" as though s/he might be able to help me with a problem that was clearly causing me pain.

Has growing evidence that brain trauma may be just as severe at the sub-concussive level affected the desire of D-III colleges to have football teams?  Not a jot, as far as I can tell.  Furthermore, I can't discern that anyone is even talking about it.  Although schools like Hofstra, Northeastern and Swarthmore have eliminated football (Swarthmore's team was legendarily awful), the trend seems to be that college football is growing, particularly on campuses that are concerned about being perceived as too female.  Football teams, like flashy student centers and hot tubs in the dorm, are perceived as a form of entertainment and a spur to school spirit that will, in turn, allow colleges to compete for the students they want.

But who is speaking on behalf of the thousands and thousands of football players, at elite and non-elite schools, who are suffering brain injuries that no one is tracking, kids who graduate and show up in the necrology section of the alumni magazine at an uncommonly early age?  Who is tracking the kids who drop out because they can't think straight, or because they are one of numerous students who get too depressed to function?  One colleague of mine at another D-III school told me about her experience last year with a student who was unable to do his schoolwork because of chronic headaches following a concussion, but had been "cleared" to practice and play the following Saturday.  S/he called the head coach to express concerns about the student's health and was directly told to butt out.  A follow-up call to the dean of faculty elicited the same response.

Yet a focus on specific incidents blurs the picture.  The fact is that we have growing evidence that football causes brain damage, and schools continue to insist that the sport is part of their educational mission.  While concussion is a possible outcome of many competitive experiences, for football it is an every day cost of practicing and playing.  Who is doing the long term studies about brain injury in football players who are competing at a level where the players are smaller, the practices less intense, but the continual bouncing of the brain inside the cranium no less consistent?

Too often, faculty assume that athletics themselves are a waste of resources and are inherently at odds with the intellectual mission of a university.  I disagree emphatically, and I particularly dislike criticisms that single out a particular group of students as undeserving, unaccomplished and unworthy of an excellent college education.  But this doesn't mean we shouldn't look at some sports more closely.  Students who are recruited for football are being brought to college to work for their education at a part-time job that is directly at odds with their ability to profit from their education over the long-term, and perhaps even in the short term.  Although some players probably gain admission to a better school than they might if they didn't have this skill, is it truly a good exchange for them if their brains are being fatally injured in the process? Why can't those young men who put their bodies on the line for an education go to good colleges anyway without risking their mental and intellectual health?

The increasing willingness of the athletes themselves, and their grieving parents, to volunteer for these studies should be a sign that those who claim to be speaking on behalf of football players' interests may be speaking from a self-interested or merely outdated perspective.  At the very least, we on college faculties should press for information and forums that acknowledge the reality of an alternative point of view about the place of this sport in higher education.

Matt Leichter's Film Review: Default: The Student Loan Documentary

Matt Leichter runs a great blog called "The Law School Tuition Bubble."  On January 20th, he provided a solid review about the film, Default: The Student Loan Documentary. I wanted to share his review with my readers, and also publicly thank him for referring to my work.

Man's Response: "We're already there! We are both defaulting on our loans, my love!"

Alan Nasser, Chicago hotel hopping, and joining EduLender

I spoke to Alan Nasser a few days ago (awesome) after my third day at work (equally awesome), and some hotel hopping (decidedly not awesome).  We spoke for over an hour and a half, and the poor man most likely had bronchitis.  It was a fantastic conversation, and I am looking forward to sharing that interview with all of you.

It was after a long day at my new job for EduLender, and even though I hadn't eaten for hours and was tired, I had been looking forward to having this conversation for two weeks. But you probably already guessed that from the above paragraph. I was elated, too, because I had just met the crew at EduLender, here in Chicago (where I'm still 'residing'), and am absolutely delighted to be joining them as their managing editor of EduTrends.

Nasser and I, not surprisingly, are on the same page about a lot of things, and it was an absolute honor and privilege to connect with him.

I am headed to Valparaiso University this evening, and will be talking to the 7th SBA Circuit tomorrow about the student lending crisis and student loan debt.

Stay tuned for my interview with Nasser and an update about my talk tomorrow.

Good night. Good luck.

Related links

Alan Nasser

"Cockeyed Economics," CounterPunch, Oct. 9, 2009.

"New Liberalism Writes Its Obituary," CounterPunch, Sept. 21, 2009

"The Bailout Lie Exposed: Financial 'Big Boys' Never Intended To Lend Out Their Windfall,"
Global Research, Oct. 28, 2008

EduLender

"Interview With EduLender Founder, Suyeon Khim," Technori, Feb. 9, 2011

The Princeton Rub; Or, How Many Tiger Mothers Does It Take To Eradicate Sexism?

Untenured faculty are always wanting to know what that little extra edge is that will get them tenure.  Be a man and ignore your students, that's my advice.  According to the Daily Princetonian, President Shirley Tilghman suggested back in 2003 that if baby Tigers did not focus so much on teaching they would have a better chance of getting tenure.  According to attorney R. William Potter (no relation to the Radical),

In December 2003, Tilghman advised junior faculty not to focus so much on teaching undergraduates; if they want to obtain the holy grail of tenure they should concentrate on scholarly research, she told them, as their “first and foremost” priority. “Their ability to conduct research and demonstrate excellence in scholarship is the most important thing we look at,” she said, although she added that teaching ability is also “considered very seriously.”

I can't find the origins of the Tilghman quote about tenure cited in the article, but if you go here you get to an article that cites Tilghman's position in 1996 that tenure is a sexist institution and ought to be abolished. Now that's what I call interesting.  But like all successful people, she now says that isn't really what she meant.  She was just trying to be provocative, she explained in 2001, recanting this position after she took office as President.

Is tenure a sexist institution at Princeton?  Maybe not, but hiring is. A 2005 study concluded, surprisingly, that a larger percentage of Tiger women than Tiger men are actually awarded tenure. But that said, only 27% of the Princeton faculty is female, so in real numbers many more men are tenured every year than women.  And shockingly, "Once promoted...women are twice as likely as male senior professors to leave the University — 2.8 percent per year versus 1.4 percent. The report gave no explanation for this phenomenon." 

Puzzling, isn't it.  Readers, can you help Princeton?

Tuition Gift Registry: EduLender Fundraisers

When it comes to researching the topic of suicide and student loan debt, I find it difficult at times to keep a safe distance from the subjects and their struggles. Only a callous and soulless individual would have the ability to remain unmoved by such stories, and I am no such person.

When I first threw out the question about suicide on August 17, 2010 - 'Who's Thought About it?  - I was quite overwhelmed by the responses. While my work on debt and suicide continues, I want to turn to something more hopeful for a moment. As most of you are aware, I am now the managing editor for a company called EduLender. (I'm presently writing this blog from a hotel in downtown Chicago, and finished three days of work at the office. I will be heading back to Dallas on Sunday, after I am on a panel at Valparaiso University to discuss the student lending crisis with law students in the region. Stay tuned for details on how that goes).

As for EduLender, the company is unique in that it provides an unbiased search engine that helps borrowers identify and compare loan options from 230+ lenders.

Because of my research and writing on AEM, and The Huffington Post, and The New England Journal of Higher Education, etc., etc., I will be hard at work, providing readers with up-to-date analysis on student loan issues on EduTrends.

There's another feature of EduLender, however, that I find absolutely thrilling. That feature is called the tuition gift registry. The name immediately tells you how it works, i.e., pretty much like a gift registry for when you're getting married. Talk about a clever idea!

So, let's say you have a loved one who likes to send you gifts or money for your birthday or on other special days. Instead of doing that, said-awesome-giving-relative-or-friend can help invest in your education. For instance, let's say you have one of those grandmothers who likes to send you money slipped in a birthday card (I had a G-Ma who did that, and I miss her sweet notes and generous cash). You can ask her to contribute to the registry and something that is far more worthwhile: your education. That way grandma can help you finance your degree(s), and you won't waste the money she sent on something useless that will probably end up in the garbage anyway.

As soon as I start talking about this concept, my tone and mood changes.

Of course, I remain focused on insisting that we are experiencing a major crisis, and once we hit that . . . er . . . magic number of $1 trillion in June of 2012, I won't be feeling particularly festive (quite the opposite in fact). So it's nice to see smart ideas coming out of such a mess, and in direct response to it. Not only is this tuition gift registry a smart idea, it is a concrete solution that helps students pay off their student loan debt.

I do grow quite tired of discussing the crisis . . .

We need solutions, and that is why EduLender's tuition gift registry makes me more than just a little bit happy.

Artificial Intelligence, Jeopardy, and the inane reporting of the New York Times

I usually write about education in this column. But, yesterday, the New York Times ran a front page article on Artificial Intelligence. They ran it because there is an upcoming competition between an IBM computer and the champions of the Jeopardy TV show. It is being billed as a man against machine competition to see if people are smarter than computers or vice versa.

Whenever there is nonsense to print these days, the Times seems to be right on it. The time claims that:

“machines (have begun) to “understand” human language. Rapid progress in natural language processing is beginning to lead to a new wave of automation that promises to transform areas of the economy that have until now been untouched by technological change.”

Long before I worked on education I was a leader in the field of Artificial Intelligence. My specialty was Natural Language Processing. I worried about how computers could possibly understand language in the same way that humans understand language. I came to the conclusion that while this was a daunting task, it was probably not an impossible one. But, in order to make computers understand language they would need dynamic memories and they would need to be able to learn (because what you hear and read changes what you know). They would also need goals (because we understand in terms of what we care about) and plans, because we learn in order to help us do something better. I began to work on learning and memory, and understanding how planning works. And, while there has been much progress in AI in those areas, we are still far from having very intelligent machines that can do such things very well.

Not according to the New York Times, of course. There headline was

SMARTER THAN YOU THINK

A Fight to Win the Future: Computers vs. Humans

Gee, will computers suddenly take over? I have been asked this question by every reporter and TV person who ever interviewed me about AI. The nonsense behind this question is too long to discuss her. But here is what the Times said:

“Machines will increasingly be able to pick apart jargon, nuance and even riddles. In attacking the problem of the ambiguity of human language, computer science is now closing in on what researchers refer to as the “Paris Hilton problem” — the ability, for example, to determine whether a query is being made by someone who is trying to reserve a hotel in France, or simply to pass time surfing the Internet.”

All this because a computer will try to play Jeopardy.

Computers have been getting by for decades now on key word search. Google has made key word search an art form. The “Paris Hilton” problem is not a problem for people however. In spoken English, the hotel is pronounced with an emphasis on Paris (as opposed to London.) But, people don’t really need that spoken cue so much because context tells you what is being talked about. We see or read about Paris Hilton. We make a reservation at the Paris Hilton. “The food is bad at the Paris Hilton” is not a confusing sentence. It is only confusing to a computer that doesn't know what you are talking about and processes only key words. In other words, the Times is discussing ideas about how to use statistics to make a best guess about what the words might mean. And then, seeing that a program might be good at this, the Times then predicts the takeover of mankind by smart computers.

The New York Times used to be a great newspaper. I have subscribed for over 40 years. But these days much of what they have to say is nonsense. When Bryant Gumbel asked me on the Today Show, many years ago, whether computers would soon take over, I attributed his question to the need for sensational junk on morning TV. The MacNeill Lehrer Report on PBS asked sensible questions. Redes in Spain asked sensible questions. But, alas the Times doesn’t care that the average reader is going to draw conclusions about a computer’s ability to understand that simply aren’t true. And I don’t think they give a damn.

'Til death do us part, unless we're talking about your student loans

So many of my readers were outraged by a recent piece in the Consumerist about a dead woman and her student loan debt. The woman graduated from the University of Kansas and died shortly thereafter from cancer. She owed $45,000 in student loan debt, so the lenders sent their collecting bloodhounds to terrorize her parents. As the article aptly states, "Because every grieving family needs to fight banks." Exactly.

Unfortunately, this story isn't remarkable. That's what outrages me. I've read several cases (and am confident there are more out there) about lenders going after those who have survived the indentured educated servant. 

As many of you know, many of these loans follow you to your grave. That is not exactly comforting.


Lenders have certainly changed the meaning of hauntings, haven't they? Funny thing is, they've inverted it. Is it really right that the hauntings are being caused by the living? Lenders, I have news for you, you're fooling around with the wrong rules. You shouldn't be tormenting dead souls, and you shouldn't be demonizing their families. This will bite you in the ass at some point. So, yeah, good luck in the afterlife.

Image Of A Despondent Student Loan Debt Ghost

Deep Cleaning, And Other Cosmic Issues: A Review of "Clutter Busting"

Brooks Palmer, Clutter Busting:  Letting Go of What's Holding You Back (Novato, California:  New World Library, 2009).  219 pp. $13.95, paper.

One of the reasons that self-help books are so successful is that they introduce complex thinking to people who aren't normally exposed to it, or who are made uncomfortable by it.  Conversely, self-help books introduce simple thinking to people who spend most of their time thinking, or at least acting, complexly.  The formula for a successful self-help book, as far as I can tell, is a title that invites the potential reader into the utopian possibility of relieving the stress of the modern condition, and simultaneously becoming modern in a far more successful way.

Take the slow food movement, as it has manifested itself in the United States.  Inspired by former commune resident, and now Chez Panisse chef, Alice Waters, slow food ideology argues that we need to look to taken for granted features of daily life for the places that we have the most control over our happiness and health.  Emphasizing the process by which things reach the table, slow food addresses critical ways in which the modern, and now the post-modern condition, undermines people of all races, genders and classes by persuading them that they really want mediocre food.  Industrial food production creates labor force abuse, high prices for inferior products and poor nutrition.  The phenomenon of "fast food" permits us all to live fast as well, doing more work for less money as we substitute a time-wasting family breakfast for a Dunkin' Donuts drive-by that costs as little as $3.00 a person and gets us to work and school faster.  Habits sold to us by the processed food industry reduce our sociality and our good health.  As slow foodies easily point out, what is gained in time and convenience is invariably lost in relaxation, nutrition, and taste.

That said, life as a slow foodie has a deceptively simple formula:  grow as much of your own food as you can, buy locally, use fresh ingredients, sit down and face each other at meals.  Those of us who followed Barbara Kingsolver's journey into this world in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle:  A Year of Food Life (2006), which is not a self help book, immersed ourselves in the beauty of this experience. Kingsolver also did, and did not, point out the difficulties of this commitment:  the creativity of growing and canning is matched by hours of back-breaking and mind-numbing labor; the seasons in which everything is fresh also requires giving one's personal calendar over to the weather and sudden ripening of a crop; you have to decide which roosters to send off to the slaughterhouse (don't, whatever you do, name the chickens); and the food stored for winter can dwindle to a few basic items long before the farmer's markets open.

My guess is that it also helps to have a big advance.

Authors like Kingsolver, Suze Orman, Andrew Weil, and Brooks Palmer, different as they are, are successful for the same reason.  The message is:  do this one thing, and you will be happy.  You will be healthier, happier, and best of all, you will be free, something that a great many Americans have craved for three centuries or so.  If you think this is just a white thing, you probably have not yet read bell hooks' Sisters of the Yam (2009), in which hooks (of whom I am a great fan but for this one volume) advocates a self-healing process that African-American women can undertake through the consumption of self-help books.

I purchased Clutter Busting:  Letting Go of What's Holding You Back in a book store that largely serves academics, which I realize was meaningful.  I bought it in exactly the way Palmer argues purchases should not be made, on impulse and in response to some neuron that fired off in my head that sent the message:  "you will be happier if you buy this book."  (Note to those who want to start clutter busting now:  Brooks also has a blog.)  A true clutterer, as I discovered to my great relief, would never have read the book, but would come home and put it on a surface.  Subsequently, s/he would have become ashamed, put it in a box, and stuffed it under the bed, with dozens -- perhaps hundreds -- of self-help books that had been purchased, unread and hoarded over the years.  Palmer, a professional stand up comic and clutter busterer,  features lots of clients who are desperately trying to help themselves by buying and acquiring things, prominent among them New Age books and tapes, and only getting into deeper doo-doo in the process.

Palmer's central argument is this: culture producers tell us that we are what we own, and many of us are persuaded that having consumer goods and things of great monetary value makes us happy.  Some of us acquire these things on the street, unable to pass an item that looks useful without stuffing it in the car.   Whatever we acquire, whether it is the magazines that we subscribe to in order to better ourselves, the multiple cats we can't bear not to bring home from the shelter, or the makeup we buy to look pretty, we become briefly exhilarated as we possess the object, then depressed when we realize that, like all the similar objects our home is filled with, it hasn't solved anything at all.  The objects then more or less taunt us, and fill our houses in such a way that they overwhelm us.  Worse, they become objects of sentiment, holding feelings that we are unwilling to let go.

Like all successful self-help people, Palmer tells stories about people who, under his guidance, have recovered from this cycle.  Usually the process of recovery involves identifying what role objects of various kinds play in your life.  The process points out how you are failing to value yourself by allowing objects this power, and what your feelings actually have to do with either real people you refuse to let go of or insecurities that are undermining you but which you hold dear.  Disabling one's self by clinging to unwanted objects and people (yes, people, pets and services are clutter too under the right circumstances) is a problem for psychotherapy, but it is also something that is amenable to action.

Most of these stories are allegories masking as reality, and show the reader very directly how to take action.  All include a cathartic moment in which Palmer's clients perform exercises of various kinds that induce a crying jag, or a an attack of helpless laughter, and then make them free.  There is no one who bars him from the house, or sets the dog on him, for example.  Palmer's techniques revolve around confronting people's delusions, talking to them about shame, and working through the emotional obligations that they feel towards objects.  They sometimes ask the object whether it is ok to send it away and explain why they must; in other situations he asks them to "name" piles of unused stuff.  "You are crap!" you might shout at a dirty, old pile of unreturned student papers from 1996 (secretly,of course, you fear that a student will return to tell you that you are a horrible teacher.) "What a pile of useless garbage!" you would point out to a pile of unused CDs that were really expensive, are still on your credit card, and that you don't ever listen to.

Here, by the way, is a good place to address the obvious point that all self-help books are not the same. But they all require these moments of truth that are arrived at through confrontation.  I could imagine Palmer holding hands with Andrew Weil as, lovingly, they cleansed a food cupboard of uneaten boxes of Ritz crackers, healthy but tasteless salt-free soups, and cocktail napkins from your last birthday party.  Simultaneously, I fantasized about a Palmer -Suze Orman smackdown in the making.  Orman would know that all those CDs were on your credit card ("And ya charged 'em?  Dintcha? DINTCHA?!") and insist you hold a tag sale to begin paying that card down.  Palmer would argue that attributing any value, monetary or otherwise, to the CDs was simply a way to hang onto them, and that they should go to the Salvation Army hasta pronto. 

One flaw in the book is that all of Palmer's clients are "cured" forever, when we know that most clutter bugs do not receive permanent salvation, slipping back into their habits and needing to be dug out again. All of Palmer's clutter bugs begin lives of self-actualization by taking the baby/giant step of clutter busting, when actually, just ceasing to hoard would be a major change that might allow a person to live exactly the same life in a happier way.  But that's ok:  in that way, Clutter Busting holds out a similar promise as Butler's Lives of the Saints without all the gruesome scenes that becoming a saint involves. 

Palmer points out what we Marxists already know:  it really isn't about the stuff, is it?  It's about the commodity fetish.  It's about  the feelings we get when we look at stuff, and the deep betrayal we suffer when commodities fail to deliver.  Clutter is about aspirations unmet; unspoken feelings of loss; relationships we can't let go; old injuries; and lack of self-esteem.  For academics, four shelves of books, double-shelved, that you have never read says:  "I'm worried I'm not smart enough!"  Or, "Maybe if other people see these books, they will recognize that I am smart."  Meanwhile, the books sit there looking at you, sending another silent message:  "You bought us, now you are stuck with us.  Before you get to your own writing, or any reading that would give you pleasure, you have to make good on the promise to read us.  What -- you don't" (sniff!) "want us any more?"

Palmer would suggest that you sit down and have a chat with these books, thank them for the time they have spent in your house, apologize for not reading them and explain to them that you want them to go somewhere that someone will really appreciate them.  Then box them up and take them to the library sale.

No more factories! How about we stop training students to be factory workers then?

The New York Times ran an article today about the closing of the last silverware factory in the U.S. While the shutting down of factories in the U.S. is sad, sadder still is the continuation of the "factory model" of education which was indeed, designed to make compliant factory workers.

Most people don't know that the schools we have today were meant to behave like factories:

In 1905, Elwood Cubberly—the future Dean of Education at Stanford—wrote that schools should be factories

“in which raw products, children, are to be shaped and formed into finished products…manufactured like nails, and the specifications for manufacturing will come from government and industry.”

William Torrey Harris, US Commissioner of Education from 1889 to 1906, wrote:

“The great purpose of school can be realized better in dark, airless, ugly places…. It is to master the physical self, to transcend the beauty of nature. School should develop the power to withdraw from the external world.”

Since we now have no factories, perhaps it is time to get rid of the factory model of education and allow children to learn in a way that is less stifling, less dark and ugly, and more likely to produce the kinds of people who can fill jobs that will exist in this century.

Politicians in nearly every country have thrived by producing graduates of school who cannot think for themselves and mindlessly go about their lives. This may have worked in the era of the factory, but there are no more factories. Yet school is still a dreary mind numbing experience.