Homo Ludens

Don't forget it, folks. You read it here.

Being playfully subversive is serious business.

Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Kermesse (1567-68)

Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Kinderspiele (1560)

I got Pieter Bruegel on the mind tonight, ever since I wrote about Napoli Crapoli. 

Scamblogging Mafia

Awesome! A hearty congratulations to your hard-work getting recognized again. Y'all make me proud. I heart each and everyone of you!!! Here's to collective action at work, comrades. I think Jewel's original piece is solid. However, she is wrong in suggesting that all scambloggers are either underemployed or unemployed. That's just incorrect. Indeed, one of the leading scambloggers has a full-time job! I am accused of the same thing, and also told that I should get over my 'law school' days. Ha! Because . . . as we all know, I went to law school. Sheesh.

In any event, I am damned proud of all of you.

And once the scambloggers are done revealing the feces and vomit smeared all over the law schools' toilets, the commodes will look like this . . . but we have a long way to go . . .  Nando, you're going to need to buy a drill and other heavy tools.

Quick Post: Who's Ted Nugent?

Ted Nugent wrote a nasty piece about how Millennials are lazy, apathetic, blah, blah, blah. It was published in some newspaper that nobody reads. 

Here's what I had to say over at SparkAction.org about his claims. 

Wise Ted Nugent Says: "Millennials f%$)!@! suck! So, uh, like take that and, uh, text it or twitter it or something . . ."

Tenured Radical is on Brief Hiatus

If you are looking for us over at the Chronicle, hang in there:  we are still unpacking. 

Sloppy Reporting, Slopping Thinking, Sloppy Dept. of Ed Officials - A Reader Weighs In

Copyright Notice: If you are not reading this at All Education Matters, and unless I've explicitly given an individual or entity permission to publish my work, this post has been illegally appropriated. Please read original content here. 

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A reader sent some interesting remarks about my recent piece that was published by USA Today. Here's what they had to say:

A key area of confusion in some articles is the very different way that federal loans (FFEL, DL and Perkins) are handled from the way that private educational loans are handled.  Unlike your articles, the mainstream press doesn't usually specify whether a debtor is trying to discharge a private loan or a federally-related loan.  In general, for the private loans, it is caveat emptor, you must go to a private insurance company (significantly prior to becoming disabled) and take out supplemental disability insurance (similar to what is offered on car loans and mortgages), otherwise there is typically no feature in the loan contract that allows a discharge for disability.

For the federal loans, there have been at least four major changes over the past three decades.  Starting with disability cases 7/1/10 and beyond, the loans are zeroed out immediately, but the debt obligation can be restored if the former borrower fails to meet the standards.  From the borrower's standpoint this still sounds better than the 2002-2010 process where the borrower had to wait in limbo for one to three years with pre-discharge medical and income verifications (now the medical and income verifications are post-discharge).  In some ways it might be better from the borrower's standpoint to return to the pre-1995 system that had deferments for temporary total disability and discharges for permanent total disability, with no medical or income verifications for either, just self-certification.

Program integrity and protections against fraud, waste and abuse need to be balanced against the borrower confusion and high administrative cost stemming from increased program complexity.  If Pro Publica, Kantrowitz and Wiley don't even understand the process, then what hope is there for the rest of us?  And what about the entities which, under the original 1966 loan program specs are obligated to perform the medical analysis?  The lenders and guaranty agencies just get a check from Uncle Sam and pass the buck down the line.  They didn't want to hire the staff to do the analysis, so, even if someone has a 1% chance of a discharge, they pass it down the line to Uncle Sam and get their federal insurance and reinsurance checks.  When the discharge application gets rejected, the borrower is no better off and is simply serviced by a federal contractor rather than a lender-servicer.  The Treasury saves money due to the sharp decrease in fraudulent discharges but everyone else pays costs in extra administration, paperwork and time.

It's Moving Day: Tenured Radical Migrates To The Chronicle Of Higher Education

Yesterday around cocktail hour the sun was slipping over the virtual mountains when we at Tenured Radical heard the sound of galloping pony hooves.  Sitting on our front porch, surrounded by boxes and half-full L.L. Bean sail bags, we squinted into the  glare and saw that it was Historiann.  "Hellzapoppin!" she yelled, in that instantly recognizable voice that is a cross between Dale Evans and Mary Maples Dunn.  She swung handily over the pommel, skirt barely in place as usual, and dropped her reins (we were impressed to see that cow pony come to an immediate halt, like they do in the movies.)  "I'm getting crazy numbers of  pings from your blog!" she said, as we put a bourbon and branch in her hand.  "When in 'tarnation were you going to tell me that you were moving?"

Oops.  There is so much going on at chez Radical we had neglected to announce that we are migrating from the Blogger site where we were born and raised to a Word Press platform hosted and maintained by The Chronicle of Higher Education.  Tenured Radical:  the 3.0 Edition will debut there shortly.

So, without further ado, I want to anticipate and answer a few questions.

Are you leaving a forwarding address?  Yes.  You should be able to click whatever link you are using and be forwarded directly to the new site.  Over time, you might want to replace that link, but don't worry about it now.

Will you be behind the pay wall?  Nope.

Will you be edited, or censored, in any way by The Chronicle?  Nope.

Will your archive move with you?  Yep:  hence the pinging over at Rancho Historiann.  The computer people have been opening the links in 723 posts to make sure they still work on the new platform.  Any problems should be reported to the management here, and we will forward them to our virtual IT friends over at the Chronicle.

Do you ever edit your posts subsequent to publication?  Yes:  I am a notoriously inaccurate typist, and frequently leave words out in my zeal to get ideas onto the screen and out to the world.  I also occasionally edit something to assuage hurt feelings: I edited a series of posts after I "came out," removing a few made-up stories that were versions of the truth.  Even though the focus of Tenured Radical has changed dramatically since those early days to avoid the personal as much as possible, I still have to edit from time to time when people mistakenly see themselves in a post.  My policy is to be attentive to the feelings of friends, students and colleagues. People I don't know, and who I haven't named, who claim they have suffered harm from one of my blog posts might want to look up "narcissistic personality disorder" in the DSM IV. 

Have you ever taken a post down completely?  There are five posts I have taken down completely.  The first was about something that happened in class, a post which rightly came back to bite me in the butt, because I had no idea that everyone at Zenith knew that I was the Tenured Radical.  I then removed three others that had the potential to do similar damage. However, I have since come to believe that it is simply wrong to write about students, or any other private person, without their permission -- this includes children, spouses, parents, colleagues, neighbors, siblings and (fill in your relationship to me here ________.) But posts about students are the worst:  written as amusing anecdotes that showcase our wit, wisdom and sorely tried patience,  they are all exploitative and mean to some degree or another.  I always make a point of telling my students in the first class that I will not write about them.

The other post I took down was, ironically, the post that originally brought me to the attention of a larger audience: "Where Credit is Due: Rutgers Basketball, Don Imus and Drive Time Shock" (April 2007.) In that post I asked why the national success of a team of African-American female scholar-athletes had caused them to be called sluts and whores by a major media figure. I compared the gender and racial dynamic in play at this moment to the significant support for the white, male members of a prominent lacrosse team, who were fighting felony charges that they had raped and beaten a stripper hired to entertain at the end of an all-day beer fest.  It was a small part of the post, but the blogging equivalent of a hand grenade: referring to the symbolic importance of a college athletic scandal I knew little about made me the object of an ongoing attack organized by an academic blogger who was writing a commercial book about the case because he believed that the charges were false.   The lacrosse players were eventually exonerated due to gross inconsistencies in the evidence, as well as multiple transgressions on the part of the prosecutor.  This public official was subsequently disbarred, and is one of several parties, including the university, who have been punished by civil lawsuits filed by the young men and their families.)

What did Tenured Radical have to do with this case?  Exactly nothing, except that the effort to achieve justice for the athletes dovetailed nicely with said blogger's campaign against so-called liberal scholars.  It was quite the experience to be sucked suddenly, and without warning, into a full-on battle against the forces of political correctness.  Members of this blogger's apparently vast audience threatened to sue me, maim me or get me fired.  They filled my comments sections with crazed invective. They left threatening messages on my voice mail.  They sent me vicious emails about what a terrible person I was, copied to numerous faculty colleagues who I am sure had no idea what a blog was or why they were supposed to care about a southern lacrosse team.  They fired off numerous letters demanding my immediate termination (often with false return addresses and written in block letters) to university officers, colleagues and the Board of Trustees.

It was a strange introduction to the blogosphere.  But it was also like getting an unasked for internship in a culture war I had thought was over, and that had certainly never touched me at good old Zenith.  In retrospect, it was a little glimpse of that libertarian nest of snakes that would emerge a few years later as the Tea Party movement, and of the "gotcha" politics that would snag people far more important than I.  On the plus side, it garnered me a ton of great readers, proving once again that there is no such thing as bad publicity as long as you don't send anyone naked pictures of yourself.

So the question is, if there is so much good news associated with this moment, and it boosted me to academic blogosphere superstardom, why did I take the post down?

Was it because I was afraid of a lawsuit, as said blogger implied in a recent series of attacks at a neoconservative website?  No. I left the Rutgers post up for a long time so that the selective quotations that made me a punching bag could be put in the context of the whole argument by a reasonable reader.  However, the post came down (I still have it, actually) after a reputable source and a blogging colleague told me that the mothers of one of the accused athletes had been inconsolably distressed by it.  Subsequently, a pseudonymous contact claiming to be the wife of a civilian contractor in the Middle East and a friend of this woman contacted me.  She amplified, in a very moving way, on the distress my post had caused in a home already under strain from the son's legal troubles.  In response, I removed the post.  I asked this correspondent to convey my deepest apologies to her friend and to put us in touch if a direct apology would be helpful, something she was unlikely to get from any of the thousands of other journalists who had vilified her son and his friends.

Whether these messages ever got through, I do not know.  Subsequently, I came to wonder whether the story about the mother was real or invented, because I came to wonder who this "friend" actually was (impersonation is quite common in the virtual world, as are "sock puppets," a single person claiming to be many different commenters.)  The pseudonymous correspondent abruptly cut off contact when, as part of my effort to reach out to her "friend," I questioned the motivations and mental health of the activist blogger who had, in my view, amplified any original harm by out of context quotation and endless, public cyber-bullying of anyone who suggested that long-standing problems of violent conduct on this team had made the false charges believable to begin with.  It has happened more than once that someone, operating out of the anonymous email accounts that are so easy to open, has made and cultivated contact with me and then disappeared when I voiced my view that the manic activism of this blogger, and an over the top obsession with women and people of color as chronically unworthy and/or dishonest, might be a symptom of a personality disorder.

So what have you learned, dear?  When in doubt about whether a topic is combustible, stay away from it, and be very, very careful when treating statements made in the media as factual.  Particularly when commenting on a topic that is likely to draw unwelcome political attention, always hedge your bets with those words we history scholars use when making an argument from inferential evidence:  "perhaps," "it seems," and "although we cannot be sure" are all useful phrases that permit the blogger to revisit an analysis later, or make a theoretical argument that stands up to new facts and reinterpretation of old facts.

Know your enemy, and don't reason with people who have an ax to grind.  Easier said than done.  However, unpleasant as it was, this episode was a great turning point for my own critical thinking about why I blogged, what I blogged, and with whom I got into pi$$ing matches.

Even when you don't know them you are writing about real people.  What one academic blogger thinks or says can't really matter, can it?  The answer to that question is that it is hard to know, and every post should be read prior to publishing with an eye to how it might  be misunderstood.  It doesn't mean that you shouldn't write it, but when flame wars start, the intelligent work you are promoting on your blog is obscured. It is a hard, but true, fact that you only get one chance in the blogosphere, and that chance is in the original post:  no amount of explanation or clarification will be adequate for your critics, who are only interested in promoting their own views.  Even if we bloggers were inclined to apologize or retract in the face of unjust criticism, we live in a society that now sees every error, every slip, as evidence of severe and permanent character flaws.

Assume that you are read by everyone in your life.  Half of your acquaintances who take umbrage at a post will never tell you; and half of these people also insist they would never be caught dead reading any blog, much less yours. 

Is this the last post over at 2.0?  Yep.  The final box just went on the virtual truck.  I'll see you all over at the Chronicle in 3.0, and Historiann?  Hope that pony got you home all right last night.  Ponies always know where to go, even when bloggers don't.

USA Today: Illness and Injury can cause 'ruinous' consequences for those with student loan debt

Copyright Notice: If you are not reading this at All Education Matters, and unless I've explicitly given an individual or entity permission to publish my work, this post has been illegally appropriated. Please read original content here. 

If you have heard problematic claims made about my character, please feel free to email me about it (ccrynjohannnsen AT gmail DOT com) and avoid feeding the trolls. 

Here is my latest piece over at USA Today. 

In Sisterhood: Support The Strike At London Met's Women's Library

There's a long history of feminist resistance in England

Eighteen months ago found your Radical in London.  On the trail of radical feminist Leah Fritz, I had also decided to check out what archival material was available on the feminist anti-pornography movement in London.  What I found at The Women's Library at London Metropolitan University changed the shape of my research.  I discovered that, just as radical feminists in the United States had become intractably divided over the representation of eroticism, Andrea Dworkin's ideas had roamed across the pond and found both opposition and fertile ground on the British left.  In the UK, where there is no absolute right to free speech, and where skinhead violence had produced legislation against hate speech that would have violated the First Amendment in the United States, the struggle took some similar, but also different forms.

I loved the Women's Library and vowed to return to do more comparative research that pushed the nationalist frame of my project.  Imagine my shock when I received an alert that dramatic cuts at London Met would endanger the work of this valuable collection and eliminate the BA in history.  From the History of Feminism Network:

The Women’s Library is home to world-renowned collections on women’s struggles throughout history and has hosted excellent exhibitions on women workers and female led-strikes. This Wednesday 22nd June 2011 Women’s Library staff will themselves take action to ensure that London Met University continues to be a thriving centre for the study of gender and feminism.

London Met Unison and UCU have voted for a one day strike on 22nd June unless the management resolve their dispute over compulsory redundancies (200 announced so far) and the closure of 70% of courses.

These cuts are of concern to all of us working in the fields of feminism and gender studies, across UK higher education institutions. Judging the value of academic disciplines according to narrow definitions of economic viability will particularly discriminate against already marginal subjects. The History BA is among those London Met courses set to close, despite it having long been such an important focus for the study of women’s history and with the Women’s Library hosting this years Women’s History Network Annual Conference.

This is why we want to express our strong support for the Women’s Library staff and everyone at London Met taking industrial action next week.

Come along to support the picket line! Meet 8am sharp, outside the Women’s Library, 25 Old Castle St, London E1 7NT (5 mins from Aldgate East Tube).

Send messages of support to moreinfo@thewomenslibrary.ac.uk and
t.doherty@londonmet.ac.uk

As the friend who sent me this confided, "While I don't know a whole lot about the cuts, I'm heartsick that an archive like The Women's Library is in danger. This is especially troubling for those of us who are pursuing subjects that are not necessarily represented in larger archives - I fondly remember my time at that archive."  So should we all.

STAY TUNED: Carpenters and Demolishers

Copyright Notice: If you are not reading this at All Education Matters, and unless I've explicitly given an individual or entity permission to publish my work, this post has been illegally appropriated. Please read original content here. 

If you have heard problematic claims made about my character, please feel free to email me about it (ccrynjohannnsen AT gmail DOT com) and avoid feeding the trolls. 

I'm presently writing a fairy tale about carpenters and demolishers in a world that pre-dates Reagan, Thatcher, and neoliberalism. At least that's when it begins, in the late 70s.

It's set in a time long, long ago, when there was still a decent infrastructure in the land where the carpenters lived, people could actually fight for their rights and be heard . . . there was a free press . . . there were politicians who believed in social justice . . . teachers weren't declared enemies of the state . . . public servants did a decent job . . . government hadn't been eviscerated by corporate interests . . .

And carpenters built good, solid homes. It was by no means a perfect world, but possibility was still within grasp.

The fairy tale will be posted on Margins of Everyday Life.

Thomas Hart Benton, "From My Mother's House" (1952)

Mr. DeMille, He's Ready For His Close-Up: Vito Russo And Gay Liberation

Michael Schiavi, Celluloid Activist:  The Life and Times Of Vito Russo (Madison:  University of Wisconsin Press, 2011).  361 pp. Index, illustrations.  $29.95 hardback.

It is June, otherwise known by Presidential proclamation as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Pride Month, a time when major cities and resort towns around the country have parades and sell beer.  What we are celebrating, other than the success of GLBT entrepeneurship, is the Stonewall Riots.  An iconic event, it began on June 28 1969 in Greenwich Village, New York, following a raid on the Stonewall Inn, and continued on for days as roving groups of queers provoked, and resisted, the police.  This, it is said, was the birth of gay liberation, which is technically true.  Activists subsequently formed the Gay Liberation Front (GLF), a group that made a definitive break with homophile politics.  For those of you who don't know this history, homophile groups were accomodationist in their strategies, trying to persuade straights and the state that gays and lesbians, except for their sexuality, were just like everyone else:  unfortunately, in this day and age of gay marriage, gay babies and gay war, this is increasingly the case.

Homophile groups like Mattachine, ONE and Daughters of Bilitis were not, however, conservative, a charge made by the GLF at the time that scholars like Martin Meeker, Marcia Gallo and David Johnson have effectively refuted.  They laid a critical foundation for community building and formal legal action that would produce a gay rights movement of the 1970s that would seek to extend basic civil rights to people, regardless of sexual orientation or gender status.  GLF, on the other hand, adopted the confrontational stance that had become characteristic of the black power, anti-war and radical feminist groups with whom many of their members were, or had been, associated. GLF was to the homophiles as the Black Panthers were to the Urban League. 

We are long overdue for more books that look at this historical moment at the level of the individual life, as Michael Schiavi, associate professor of English at New York Institute of Technology, does in Celluloid Activist.  Vito Russo was one of the gay men who came to Greenwich Village as a young gay man to embed himself in its queer counterculture, and he quickly became involved in radical activism after Stonewall.  But Russo is even more famous for his path-breaking book, The Celluloid Closet:  Homosexuality in the Movies, originally published in 1981 and re-published in a revised edition in 1987.  Born in 1946, this founder of gay cultural criticism should be signing up at the social security office this year, but like many men of his generation he contracted AIDS and died in 1990.

Schiavi's is an authorized biography, which may account for its emphasis on Russo's achievements (which were many) and its less sure touch about the complexities of his personality.  Schiavi has a keen sense of Russo's place in the gay men's culture that flourished in the 1970s, organized around uninhibited sexuality, and known colloquially as "the party." Schiavi's difficult task of situating Russo in his social world, and interpreting him through it is largely successful, and caused me to wonder whether, for certain figures, group biographies are almost necessary.

Russo had a network of deeply devoted friends, who were attracted to his evanescent personality and sharp intelligence, friends whose patience he often tried.  Russo's love life is a particular minefield: he seemed to be both a little bit of (what we used to call back in the day) a star f**cker, and he very much enjoyed being the object of star f**king.  While relationships were not the strong suit of many queer folk in those years, in part because relationships were either not the point or they were wide open, Russo seemed to have a particular penchant for falling in love with beautiful, helpless, unemployed boys; pledging undying devotion to them; moving them into into his apartment; and then getting really, really sick of them and kicking them out.  It didn't make me not like him, but it did make me think that there was some deeper insight that Schiavi was avoiding here, perhaps out of tact and deference to the family.

Russo's work on the Celluloid Closet (which was made into a documentary after his death) came from a public lecture he put together over the years, in which he demonstrated, through film clips and analysis, how unnamed but very obvious "gayness" in films produced, and shored up, the idea of "heterosexuality."  This is such a basic tenet of queer studies now that it is hard to recall what a stunning insight this was in the 1970s and early 1980s, particularly since there were not so many gay or lesbian books.  Russo came to this analysis from his formal academic training in film and a lifetime of fandom.  Like many gay kids, Vito seem to have been born a movie queen and a fan of the great divas:  Stanwyck, Crawford, Davis.  He was one of those guys weeping in the front row as Judy Garland, in her late years, stumbled drunkenly over her lyrics mid-set.  He developed an encyclopedic knowledge of classic Hollywood film making and acquired a rather large collection of movies (Schiavi suggests that some of these may have been stolen) prior to the days when such things were available on VCR, and delighted in showing them to friends.

Vito maintained a rather tenuous economic existence, even though he worked constantly as a journalist and operated on the edge of show business, a world he clearly adored (one of his great thrills after his AIDS diagnosis was an introduction to Elizabeth Taylor.)  He was friends with Bette Midler during the Divine Miss M's Continental Baths days, and then not so much when he insisted that she identify with queer activism after her mainstream success, something she clearly viewed as exploitation and he viewed as her selling out the people who had made her career in the first place.  (I think they were both right, although it isn't clear what Schiavi thinks.) Vito's relationships with other celebrities endured, however, particularly his friendship with Lily Tomlin.  One of the interesting parts of the book which should push another scholar to get going on her, is Tomlin's development of comic characters that were clearly queer, her struggles over coming out, and her regret, voiced at the end of the book, that she did not do so earlier.

Vito Russo was in the first great wave of men to be diagnosed in the portion of the AIDS epidemic that swallowed communities of urban gay men in the 1980s.  One of the triumphs of this book is that it articulates what it felt like to be at Ground Zero in downtown New York, as one's friends died slowly of horrible diseases that could just barely be treated.  I found these chapters enormously difficult to read, as the lists of men who had peopled the early chapters of the book were diagnosed and died.  Schiavi also depicted, quite accurately in my view, how those years felt. I recall sick men taking care of sick men; the halls at NYU hospital where deathly ill people waited for a bed for days; parents unable to comprehend the cataclysmic, sudden death of a child; scattering ashes in favorite vacation spots.  People behaved far better than you might ever have imagined they could, and they behaved indescribably badly.  I recall watching an age peer wander around the room incontinent and unable to find the bathroom, the rest of us not knowing that his brain was being eaten by toxoplasmosis because his lover (who was also infected but didn't want anyone to know) insisted that our friend had been tested (he hadn't) and didn't have AIDS.  All of this is in the book, and Schiavi describes it with a sure narrative touch.

One reason to read, or to teach, this book, is that it links lots of different things in the life of one person:  gay community, activism, the emergence of a gay intellectual sensibility, the party, and the party's end.  Because of this, when it comes out in paper, you could easily use it as a text for a post-1945 GLBT history course.  But honestly?  It's also a good read -- not always an easy one, but a good one -- and you might want to have it on your bedside table when you are done with Gay Pride and ready to return to gay life.

October 6 - Washington DC

Copyright Notice: If you are not reading this at All Education Matters, and unless I've explicitly given an individual or entity permission to publish my work, this post has been illegally appropriated. Please read original content here. 

If you have heard problematic claims made about my character, please feel free to email me about it (ccrynjohannnsen AT gmail DOT com) and avoid feeding the trolls. 

It would be great if we could coordinate a protest in So. Cali on the same date. If you can make it to D.C., I urge you to attend. 

NO to subjects and NO to requirements

I have been spending a great deal of time in Europe lately, where the talk is about what to do about the awful governments that countries like Italy, Greece and Spain seem to be saddled with. (I am not saying the U.S. Is any better, maybe it is even worse -- I am simply reporting what I am hearing.)

In the course of one of these conversations, the talk turned to education, as it tends to do when I am around. The suggestion was made that schools should require students to learn about how government works, or maybe how it should work, in order to help citizens make better choices about who governs them and to be better at it when they are actually part of the government.

I replied that this was a fine idea, especially if we let students run simulated governments rather than simply learning political theory. Feeling emboldened, a woman who had raised a family and who, I think, felt that she hadn’t done such a good job, asked if maybe some courses in child raising shouldn’t also be required.

I certainly agree with this as well. I tried to convince the developmental psychologists at Columbia, when I was building Columbia on line, to do exactly that but they, of course, wanted to teach about research.

Whenever there is a roomful of people talking reasonably about education there are many reasonable suggestions. The problem is, that soon enough, well meaning people would wind up designing a system that looks a lot like the one we already have in place.

No one ever agrees to eliminate history and all agree that mathematics must be useful even if it never has been useful to them. This goes on and on until students, in the hypothetical system being thought about by intelligent people, is as awful as the one we have now.

At some point people, and by this I mean school boards, governments, universities, and average citizens have to get over the idea that there should be any requirements at all in school.

Now I realize that this is a radical idea. Do I mean students would not be required to learn to read or write or do basic arithmetic? No. I mean after these skills have been mastered, students should be let alone, or rather enticed, to find an interesting path for themselves. The schools ought to be constantly and diligently teaching students to think clearly and should not be trying to tell them what to think about.

We will never change education as long as we hold on to our favorite subjects and insist that they be taught. Everyone has a favorite subject, or has an axe to grind, or has a stake in something not being eliminated. Soon enough it is all sacred and school is deadly boring and irrelevant.

Anyone who has ever been part of a curriculum committee in a university knows what I am talking about. Everyone fights for their subjects.

NO to subjects and NO to requirements. Let students learn to do what they want to learn to do. Schooling should be about helping students find a path and succeed at what they have chosen to do.

A Radical History Review: A Perhaps Unnecessary, But Overdue, Tribute To My Dad

We at Tenured Radical no longer have a father to give presents to, or buy cards for, on Father's Day.  When we did have a father, this is who he was.  He probably had as many flaws as the next 1960s and 1970s Dad, but he was a very nice person, a widely admired physician, and a hard worker.  He went out of his way to make a nice life for his family and to provide the resources that made it possible for both of his daughters to have an excellent education.

Although I don't think he would have described himself this way, he was an organic intellectual who had tremendous curiosity about the natural, social, cultural and political world.  He was the Oliver Saks of internal medicine, collecting and collating information with what I can only describe as pleasure, putting it together like a puzzle until all the pieces fit. In practical terms, this meant he was a very good and thorough doctor, and would bird-dog a peculiar set of symptoms until they could be treated effectively. Once, over four decades ago, before tick-born diseases were well known to all of us, he correctly diagnosed a man who had  Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever -- a disease that was entirely treatable, but had been missed because it almost never appeared in Pennsylvania. 

We held a memorial service for Dad back in September, 1997, two months after he died so that everyone from the hospital could be there.  One of the things that was truly memorable (I do not remember a thing about the eulogy I delivered, although I have a copy of it filed away somewhere) was the number of people who got up to speak about him and revealed things I had not known about Dad.  And yet, each of these anecdotes was completely consistent with the person I did know.  For example, a developmentally disabled man whose job it was to keep the stairwells clean got up to speak in front of about three hundred people.  He explained his job, and said that every day my father made a point of telling him what good work he was doing on the stairs and thanking him for it. 

Dad really liked people, and he was interested in them:  he spent hours in the evening and on weekends talking to his patients on the telephone, often helping them make decisions about painful chronic diseases, terminal cancers or conditions that had suddenly turned scary.  I remember lots of conversations ending with him saying, "Go to the emergency room, and I'll meet you there," and he would get dressed and head back out to the hospital no matter what time it was.

When Dad retired because his own illness had advanced, he was deeply concerned about the increasingly money-driven, and litigious, world of medicine that was separating the interests of doctors from their patients and making personalized care all but impossible for many young doctors who would have liked to provide it.  As chief of medicine, he also understood that lots of different people played important roles to make the mission of a hospital successful, and that all jobs -- even the ones that other people might view as menial -- were important.  He  enjoyed teaching, he enjoyed solving difficult medical problems, he appreciated the professionalism of his nurses and he enjoyed helping young doctors make their careers.

I realized some years ago that, despite the great differences in our professional lives, I have ended up sharing many of my father's values and pleasures, even though I don't recall him ever having conveyed them except by example. One of the many reasons I am sorry he is dead is that I think we would have enjoyed talking about these things together.  So, without further ado:

Happy Father's Day, Phil Potter.  The mission continues.

Borrower Receives Misinformation about IBR from Sallie Mae

A distressed borrower named Amy called me today for help on her student loans. She was very distraught, because she and her husband are having a great deal of difficulty making ends meet. She is unemployed, and her husband is a nurse who travels around the country for work. Amy is also the mother of two children. She home schools them and the family currently lives in Texas.

She and her husband were thinking that it might be best for her to default on her student loans, so she wanted to talk to me about the plan of action. They have medical bills and credit card bills, as well as two growing children to feed.

When Amy and I first got off the phone, she was in tears. I did encourage her to look into IBR as a way to lower her payments. As it stands, Amy has subsidized and unsubsidized loans. Sallie Mae is the servicer of a portion of her debt. Since she has not defaulted on her loans, she is eligible for IBR.

Amy thanked me for the information, and I hung up.

A few minutes later, she called back and was more frustrated.

"They told me that my payments would go down to $105.31 for the first 12 months. However, after those twelve months are up, I was told that my payments would go up to $696 a month."

We were both puzzled. At this point, Amy pays around $500 a month, so how could IBR possibly be helpful if (a) the repayment program only lasted a year after which (b) her payments would shoot up to something even higher than what she is paying now?

"That makes no sense to me," I told her. Since my expertise is not on repayment plans, I told her that I would have to ask some of my sources about this information. Amy was distraught again, and for justified reasons.

I made it very clear, however, that she would be worse off by defaulting. I assured that I would have answers for her soon.

We hung up again.

After I sent out some questions about this situation, Amy called me a third time.

The news was much better this time.

Amy still hates Sallie Mae, but at least she cleared up the confusion about IBR. Here's what she found out:

In order to keep her monthly payments at $106.31, she will need to refile her paperwork with Sallie Mae every year. 

The first person with whom she spoke did not provide her with that important detail! 

Amy is much more relieved. She currently owes around $62,000. The good thing about IBR is this - it lowers your payments, and if you continue to pay for 25 years, the remainder of your debt is then cancelled.

So, folks, make sure you know all the information about IBR before deciding it's not a good option.

Tell Me How You Really Feel, Dude: Prof Said To Have Peed On Colleagues' Office Doors

We at Tenured Radical have been alerted by our pals in the legit educational press (Inside Higher Ed) that there are many more reasons than we knew to hire more women in the STEM fields. Tihomir Petrov of the Cal State Northridge math department is on the lam after having failed to appear in court to answer two charges of public urination, a misdemeanor.  Where did he pee?  In his department, apparently.

It sounds like revenge urination to us, and a unique way of showing contempt for colleagues that we feel lucky to have never encountered.  Imagine coming to work and finding a big puddle of man-pee in front of your office. According to the Los Angeles Times, "In early December, Petrov was captured on videotape urinating on the door of another professor's office in Santa Susana Hall, according to authorities. School officials had concealed a camera nearby after discovering puddles of what they thought was urine at the professor's door, officials said."  It seems that Petrov might have an ongoing problem with either retention or rage.

Although the evidence seems strong, Petrov has pleaded not guilty, and there is no sign of him anywhere on the department web site.

Serious Fantasy: The Institute for the Indentured Educated Class

There is this big, somewhat ugly house next to where I am currently living. It has been stripped clean, and the owners have been gone for well over a year. It's a foreclosure. The bank tends to mow it at the last minute, so it's this hideous eye sore in a nice, tidy neighborhood. Every time I walk by it with my dogs, I get really pissed. I have thought about leaving my dogs' shit in the yard, but then I realize that that would be utterly rude to the poor guys who must mow the yard each month. So, I pick up my dogs' shit and curse the bank that owns it. Then I curse a bunch of other banks, as well as politicians . . . by the time I get back home, I am seething. So . . . here's something I'd like to do with that house.

I'd like to buy it, fix it up, and turn it into . . . The Institute for the Indentured Educated Class. Wouldn't that be awesome? We could house a few people each month who were in real dire straights, and then have writers and researchers and scambloggers come and spend time there - it would be a commune. It would help the downtrodden sans pity or paternalistic scorn, and it would inspire people to think about all sorts of issues. It would be a meeting ground for like-minded and concerned citizens. It would be a tiny plot that still represented democracy in a wilderness of decadent, destructive neoliberal shit. It would be great to do it in Texas, for it would show that Texas, like its diverse and ever-changing population, has serious potential for good.

How can we change this serious fantasy into something real?

Quick Post: Victor E. Cilli Arrested and Charge in Student Loan Ponzi Scheme

Victor E. Cilli, 45, was arrested by FBI agents in New Jersey. Cilli, a day trader, is accused of stealing $1.5 million from a Cleveland Bank in a student loan scam. Authorities also say he stole $500,000 from investors. 

The investigation of Cilli's activities has been going on for years.

He has been involved, authorities say, in a number of Ponzi schemes, one of which includes at least 16 other participants.

I wonder if Cilli's door was broken down like Wright's in California . . .

Question: Why Do Development Offices Raise Money For Sports When Academics Are Being Cut?

I've got an idea:  let's run a fund-raiser for the humanities!

Answer: Because the entertainment value of major sports for fans, alumni/ae and students -- primarily the football and basketball programs that can be packaged and sold to a mass audience --  is viewed as a necessary and normal feature of university life.  But that's not true.  Instead, it is a competitor for funds that ought to be going to teaching and learning, and because of that, part of what threatens the survival of full-time academic labor and the accessibility of higher education to a broad range of students.

Why am I, a sports fan, thinking these crazy thoughts?  Libby Sander's reports in the Chronicle of Higher Education this morning that 22 elite college sports programs made a profit in the last fiscal year.  This is an increase from "from 14 the previous year....The median surplus at those programs was $7.4-million last year, up from $4.4-million in 2009."  However, the median deficit in the Football Bowl Subdivision (this is the category that used to be called Division I-A) was $11.6 million.

Let me put this in the homey, old-timey budget language that conservative politicians prefer.  This news is similar saying that, of the seventy people who live on my street, two of us made more than we did last year, and everyone else went more deeply into debt.  And both of us who made money did so because our parents wrote us a big, tax-deductible check.

Of course, this is old news.  But think of the aggregate deficits in programs below the FBS.  It's a staggering amount of money that could be used to lower tuitions, give financial aid and hire full-time faculty who would be able to devote themselves to educating students at public schools the way  can devote ourselves to teaching and advising at places like Zenith.  That colleges and universities would continue to invest in an enterprise on the unproven theory that it is good for the overall fiscal health of the institution is a business model that would simply be jeered at outside the Church of Latter Day Sportsfans.

If you are waiting for one of those garden-variety attacks on college sports programs more generally, you can stop reading:  I don't think they are any less useful than any of the other budget lines devoted to co-curricular student life.  I continue to believe that organized sports are good for student-athletes:  at their best they create a sense of community and identity, instill discipline, and -- here's something that troubles our intellectual project -- teach students how to cope with failure.  Furthermore, it is only a very few teams who are responsible for the vast majority of a school's athletic budget.  If you take out the big so-called "revenue generating" sports like football, and men's and women's basketball, athletic programs represent a lot of jobs, most of which are not particularly well paid. You can, for example, get a top-flight, national team quality rowing coach who manages 50 - 100 athletes at a D-I school for under $80K, most pay more like $45K, and many entry level coaching positions at Ivy League rowing (and other athletic) programs pay under $10K, if they pay at all.

But you have to ask:  in a period of budget cutting, why are enterprises that justify themselves through their supposed potential to generate revenue to support the university's academic mission -- but actually don't -- not scrutinized?  With another million tossed on top, that $11.6 million that the average school loses on major sports represents an endowment that would add three tenure-track positions.  Don't like tenure?  Well, budget those positions as contract faculty earning good wages and benefits at $200K a year, and we are talking about employing 55 extra faculty.  Instead, these schools are howling about how much the English department costs and flushing all this money away.

Furthermore, when athletic programs are threatened, it seems to be a trigger for unbelievable fundraising that academic cuts don't inspire, despite the fact that a B.A. in history is more likely to send a young person off to law or medical school than four years stomping around on the sidelines as a second string special teams dude.  At UC-Berkeley, a school that has suffered debilitating cuts to its academic programs, three programs that were on the block -- women’s lacrosse, women’s gymnastics and rugby -- were saved only a few months after the cuts were announced by fundraising solicited by "alumni, student-athletes, coaches and fans."  Of course, cutting these teams would not have been necessary if the so-called "revenue generating" sports were not swallowing the athletic budget.

While the pledges that saved these programs sound like an act of spontaneous love, those of us who work for universities know that no one is allowed to raise money without the permission and support of the development office. Furthermore, you don't come up with the kind of money that Berkeley did (between $12 and $13 million in pledges) without having tapped some very, very deep pockets.  We are not talking bake sales and pathetic, dinner time cold calls from student-athletes.  My guess? Somebody pulled the trigger on donors who had already been identified, and the "cuts" had been targeted in such a way as to activate those donors.

What a development officer would tell you is that these major donors aren't willing to give that kind of money to support teaching or learning, and that the university might as well collect it for something they do support -- even if that project creates or solidifies a budget commitment that could otherwise be eliminated.  Giving money to schools for high-profile sports rather than education is an absurd proposition unless you put it in the context that policy makers and major foundations like Gates appear to believe that a teaching career is the professional equivalent of a life spent as a Peace Corps volunteer or a nun.  However, if that is so, whose fault is that?  Who is not making the argument for the importance of these fields?  The very highly paid administrators and fundraisers whose job it is to do so, that's who.  Too often the burden of persuasion is put on the shoulders of those of us who are also laboring 50 - 80 hours a week in the classroom:  this is a little like telling the people who walked out of Merrill Lynch with their personal items packed up in boxes on an hour's notice that they were personally responsible for policies set by the CEO, the Board of Directors, the Fed and Congressional oversight committees.

Big-time sports are a fiscal drag on the educational enterprise, and should not be the object of major fund-raising.  Worse, they are a source of fictional knowledge about what role colleges and universities are supposed to play in our political and social economy.  They promote the notion that higher education is really just entertainment and that college and university campuses are a playground for students and alumni/ae alike.  If we faculty have a role in this, it is to demand answers to these questions, particularly since we are doing the lion's share of the work for a fraction of what these programs cost.

Dept. of Education's SWAT Team Story - Insider from the Department of Education Comments?

There are a number of higher education policy experts who share their thoughts on AEM. Congressional aides and student advocate groups also spend time on here. The comments from these individuals are oftentimes intriguing, especially when they suggest that the person is responding from an institutional perspective.

Last week a story that originally aired on News10 in Stockton, California caught my eye. I was not the only one to pounce on the clip about the alleged Department of Education's S.W.A.T. Kenneth Wright had his door destroyed at approximately 6 AM. The story also sparked a curious response from a reader.

Recap of the Stockton events


[Note: If you've been following this story closely, skip ahead to the section entitled, "Reader's Curious Remarks"]

After his door was broken down, Wright was then handcuffed in his boxers and shoved into the back of a patrol car for 6 hours. News10 initially showed Wright saying, "pay back your student loans [or the Department of Education's S.W.A.T. team will break down your door]." The clip has since been changed, and the news station rewrote the story and focused on the question of excessive force.

It turns out the agents had a warrant for Wright's estranged wife. Wright claims he has no criminal record and has since hired an attorney.

Wright's children, ages 3, 9, 11 were also at home when this incident occurred. (UPDATE: The original story mistakenly stated that his children were 3, 7, and 11).

AEM was one of many blogs to break the story and spread the news about Wright's experience. I followed the updates from the station and exchanged emails with them. In addition, I wrote a piece for USA Today about the incident and also spoke with a Press Officer at the Department of Education. (Links below are listed in chronological order and show the way in which the story unfolded).

SparkAction.org, FutureMajority, and Crooks & Liars picked up my work and also commented on my analysis. I want to thank those outlets and groups for providing their readers with information about the situation.


Reader's Curious Remarks


On June 9th at 11:16 PM, a reader responded to my piece, "Viral Wildfires: Terrified Debtors Spread The Word About Department of Education's SWAT Team," and was surprised by my response to this show of enforcement. It is my view that the agents used excessive force in this situation.

Here's what they said (truncated version):

Cryn, you have been a consistent voice citing the lack of oversight of the financial aid programs by federal officials, including at Educ. Dept. and FSA. One would think that, of anyone out there, you would be the one cheering this aggressive raid loudly at the top of lungs. For months you have been saying that the Educ. Dept. is essentially captive of the educational sector and has completely dropped the ball on oversight, enforcement and compliance -- essentially letting postsecondary institutions run wild, without regulation. Whether it is for-profit or non-profit colleges, the lack of enforcement has been a running theme.

This is what enforcement looks like. One of the major focuses is ginned-up scams to obtain Pell Grants and Stafford loans. Granted, there is probably too much focus on $5 million schemes, rather than $500 million schemes. That is political reality, though, to go after those who don't have lobbyists backing them up in Washington. However, there is certainly never going to be the move on the large potatoes when the blogosphere is ridiculing even the most basic enforcement efforts.

Surely, borrowers would be much better off if the Educ. Dept. had put a top 10 college and a top 10 lender out of business in 2005. While a few hundred students and borrowers would likely have had their lives disrupted for a semester or two, the lives of millions of students and borrowers could have been brightened in the years subsequent, as colleges and lenders cleaned up their act, motivated by the fear of aggressive enforcement.

To get a historically politically-weak agency up to where it can effectively police the wrongdoers, whether large institutions or small gangs of financial aid scam artists, the organizational prestige needs to be raised to the level of agencies such as Labor (OSHA, etc.), DoD, DHS, Treasury, FBI, and so on [my emphasis].

To accomplish your stated goals, what is needed is 'viral wildfire' supporting aggressive raids, not ridiculing them . . . A cursory review of the last couple decades of OIG semiannual reports would indicate a consistent effort to move against the financial aid scam artists, including those who embezzle federal funds. Many of these perps were not attempting to attend college; the programs were simply a source of illgotten cash for them. What is wrong with attempting to arrest and prosecute them? The enforcement efforts against small for-profits have also been consistent. It would certainly be better if the Educ. Dept. and FSA also were as tough on larger institutions, including colleges, guarantors and lenders, but why throw the baby out with the bath water and abandon all enforcement efforts?

Where to begin? For starters, there is no reason why I should be applauding this action. That would be like saying that if the Feds somehow broken down the door of some banker from Wall Street and, let's say, eventually arrested him for fraud, we should understand this to be some sort of victory. Meanwhile, business as usual continues on Wall Street and everyone continues to be royally screwed by an unjust system. Unless a citizen is armed and threatening to kill people, there is no reason whatsoever for this show of force. That is why so many people were outraged. And I frankly don't care if Wright is part of a larger group of people embezzling money or involved in other fraudulent activities. He shouldn't have been treated like that, and his children shouldn't have been subjected to that inappropriate show of force.

The writer clearly believes that the Education Department is too weak to take on the powerful and the way to build up strength is to go after the small fry first, as if that is going to scare the big institutions and lenders.  Others might say that going after only the little scams just emboldens the big ones.


The writer also is jumping ahead of the known facts.  Maybe this is indeed small-fry fraud, but that was not how it was first reported by the television station and why it got so much publicity.  For a day or two it looked as if it were a collection effort. That is precisely why so many people were drawn to the story, and expressed a great deal of fear about the possibility of the same thing happening to them. It is not a great leap to think that collectors could come and break down a door at 6 in the morning.

Here's another take. Let's assume this reader has or does work for the Department of Education. (They certainly sound like an insider of sorts - at least to me). If this is an insider writing to me, it shows that the Department internally does not think it can effectively enforce the law against the politically connected, and may even have given up trying.



Related Links

"UPDATED 6/9/2011 (6:19 EST) Viral Wildfire: Terrified Debtors Spread The Word About Department of Education's SWAT Team," AEM 

"Pay your debt or else! SWAT Team Visits Loan Defaulter -- UPDATED," Crooks and Liars, Nicole Belle, June 9, 2011

"The Department of Education Means Business," The American Conservative, June 9, 2011

"U.S. Education officials let for-profit colleges and 'universities' off easy, but beat down innocent consumer's door, handcuff him for six hours," U.S. PIRG Consumer Blog, June 9, 2011

"Does the Department of Education have a SWAT team?," USAToday, June 8, 2011

"Pay your student loans or else," Future Majority, June 8, 2011

"Education Department S.W.A.T. team raids California home," Washington Post Blog, June 8, 2011

AEM Coverage

Breaking News: Copy of the Warrant!,  June 9, 2011

UPDATE The Department of Education S.W.A.T. Team Fiasco, June 9, 2011

Update III, June 9, 2011

Update II: Department's Response (via Twitter) To SWAT Team Bustin'  Down Man's Door, June 9, 2011

BREAKING NEWS: JackBootED Thugs: Big Brother Comes a-Knockin', June 9, 2011

"The Unamused Reader," Bart Sparnaaji

Too Badgered? Biddy Martin Leaves Wisco Chancellorship, Heads To Amherst As President

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports today that Carolyn A. ("Biddy") Martin will leave her post as Chancellor of the University of Wisconsin and become President of Amherst College.  However, she has been quite clear that it is not because Governor Scott Walker and the Republican legislature are trying to flush the state's education system down the toilet. And it isn't because her plan to break the flagship away from the other campuses ran into trouble, in case that had occurred to you.

The news became public the day after Wisconsin's Supreme Court upheld the state's new anti-union legislation.   As Jack Stripling writes,

Ms. Martin was emphatic that the failure of the proposal to break the flagship campus from the university system, a quietly devised plan that drew the consternation of the system's Board of Regents when they learned of it, was not among the reasons for her departure.

"Amherst would have been an attractive possibility to me at any point, because of my own history, what I feel like I owe to liberal-arts education," Ms. Martin said. "What role the actual events of the past year have played, it's hard to say. Maybe a year from now, it will be clear to me what various strands went into the braid of this decision. What I can tell you, honestly, is I'm not leaving because I didn't like the outcome in the Legislature."

Being president of well-endowed Amherst -- and living in that part of the country we New Englanders simply refer to as "The Valley" is a sweet deal, however you cut it, particularly if you are a lesbian.  (Is Martin the first out lesbian college prez?  Enquiring minds want to know.)  Those who follow the progress of top administrators can't help but think that Martin is headed for the presidency of a major research institution after she proves her leadership skills with the Lord Jeffs -- a school which, by the way, has a fantastic faculty, but which Zenith hammers in rowing several times a year.

I think Biddy Martin will do a great job at Amherst, but that won't change any time soon unless she can bring a few Wisco oarsmen and women with her.

Thomas Cooley Law School - What Are They Hiding?

If you recently attended and graduated from Thomas Cooley Law School, please send me an email (ccrynjohannsen AT gmail DOT com).

A little bird sent me some claims about Cooley recently, and James Thelen, the Associate Dean for Legal Affairs and Counsel, sent me a threatening letter. He gave me permission to publish his letter, and after speaking with my counsel, I did so (links are provided below).

They have some things up their sleeve, and those tidbits aren't the lovely things I have held up my own, puffy sleeves (that's because I'm not defending a questionable institution, but instead fighting on behalf of the indentured educated class).

Let's continue to investigate . . .

Related Links

The Thomas M. Cooley Law School Scam

Repost - Investigating Law Schools (Class Action Suits), AEM, May 22, 2011

[UPDATE] Dean James Thelen from Thomas M. Cooley Law School Responds With A Threatening Letter, AEM, April 28, 2011

Part II: Thomas M. Cooley Law School, AEM, April 28, 2011

UPDATED: MUST READ Thomas M Cooley Law School Under Investigation For Serious Title IV Violations, AEM, April 27, 2011

Every Graduate A Potential John Dillinger: An Incomplete History Of Student Loan Repayment

Banks seestudent loan defaulters as white collar bandits

Back in 1981, a New York friend of mine went to the bank shortly after payday to find that hir checking account was abso-total-lutely empty.  Zero.  Zed. Nada.  In the course of an inquiry that began with outrage and ended in shame, ze discovered that the federal government had attached hir salary to begin reclaiming a thousand dollars or so of the student loan arrears ze had amassed since graduating three years earlier.

This was back in the day when student loans for an Ivy League education might top out at around $10K for a degree that had cost under $50K in 1970s dollars.  Prior to Ronald Reagan raising the interest rate from 3% to 9% in 1982, and eliminating the deduction for student loans in 1986, my guess is that the payments were a couple hundred dollars a month (go here for Kelly Phillips Erb's excellent history of student loans in a recent issue of Forbes.)

I cannot recall the details of this person's circumstances. However, back in the day, I knew a great many people who didn't pay their students loans, and there were three reasons for it.  The first was that many of us earned very little money. We graduated into a recession job market, we went into artsy, theatrical or literary fields, and people like us could be had for salaries of less than $12K a year.  This translated into a paycheck of around $450 every two weeks, half of which had to be banked for rent.  The second reason people didn't pay was that they could get away with it.  The federal government did a very poor job of monitoring who paid and who didn't pay, and didn't report people to credit agencies for years after they had broken all contact.  This latter action would have had immediate consequences in a city where landlords routinely ran credit reports to screen out potential deadbeat tenants who, under consumer-friendly New York housing laws, were nearly impossible to evict.  Hence, I knew a number of non-payers that -- after missing a couple payments and suffering no consequences -- stopped paying entirely even when they could easily afford to do so.  The third reason people didn't pay was that, because there was no means test for awarding student loans, anyone could walk into the financial aid office and walk out with $5K, minus an exorbitant processing fee of several hundred dollars.  In other words, some people who had taken out student loans had used them to enhance their standard of living.  I am just speculating, but I believe this category of borrowers may have regarded student loans as free money all along.

Back to the empty bank account:  I must say, all of us who met this friend at a bar later and chipped in what we could from our own paychecks to help hir make rent, were seriously impressed by the possibility that an entire bank account could be seized.  By moving against one person, the government made a dramatic impression on a whole friendship network of twenty-something middle-class people.  Several rushed in to various financial institutions on the following day to ask for mercy and make arrangements to pay up.  Although I had no student loans, I made a mental note at the age of 22 that I would never default on a bill.  You might ask, why would you have ever defaulted, Tenured Radical?  The answer is that I was at the beginning of my financial life, had never had a conversation about money with my parents or anyone else, and was just learning to pay bills in the first place. 

One of my Google alerts is "student loans." It will be no surprise to anyone that students -- many of whom are adults -- are taking out more money in educational loans than they ever have, which I believe has a reverberating, depressing effect on the economy as a whole whether the money is repaid or not.  For-profit institutions make borrowing particularly easy in exchange for degrees that may or may not translate into a job at all, much less one with a high enough salary to guarantee repayment.  On-line universities and technical academies can be the worst offenders, siphoning tax dollars in the form of uncapped debt into inflated executive salaries paid out of tuition revenues that are 90% loan driven.  Non-profits have constant institutional discussions about what the caps on student debt ought to be, but despite that, many students graduated this spring from Ivies, state unis and liberal arts colleges that aren't trying to cheat anyone with as much as $50K in loans.  

Students, needless to say, were defaulting on unsustainable education debt at very high rates even before the job market became so tight.   But unlike other debt, as Megan McArdle points out in the June 14 edition of The Atlantic, whether they are government or private, student loans are forever:

There are only two ways to erase the debt: prove you're permanently disabled and will never again earn more than a pittance; or die.  [Note:  I had a friend who chose the latter strategy of dead-beatism.  After hir death, I discovered a shoebox of dunning notices from the federal government -- another branch of which had been paying hir disability and welfare -- that dated from hir diagnosis with a then-fatal disease. But I think there are also some programs in the military that also pay down debt, which has become an incentive to become cannon fodder among people who have no other reason to serve.]

Moreover, student loans are large, which means they're worth suing over. Creditors can correctly assume that most people with a college diploma, or a law degree, are eventually going to have something worth taking: a bank account they can seize, a salary they can garnish. Everything I have ever heard indicates that there is little chance of settling a student loan for less than the principal, and that even that is far from a slam dunk. If the interest has been accruing for a decade or so and is now multiples of the original value of the loan, the lender may waive some of it, but not necessarily all of it. Moreover, most of the amount forgiven counts as taxable income, including a lot of the back interest (any amount in excess of $2500--or all of it if you make more than $75,000 a year.)

And of course getting a principal-only settlement requires you to amass a sum equal to the original principal of your student loan--without the creditor finding and seizing it.

So if you are a college graduate who thinks ze needs another degree to even imagine getting an interesting job, someone who wants to complete a degree, a mother considering a return to the workforce, or someone who simply wants to change directions, you need to have a plan for paying that money back before taking the loan out.  Smart colleges and universities will begin helping students learn to plan this kind of strategy, as well as working ethics courses into the curriculum so that students won't feel so free to step away from an obligation they have contracted when the full impact of that contract becomes clear.