Friday, June 10, 2011

There was a thought-provoking and depressing piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education the other day. It was written by Tom Lutz, a professor of Creative Writing at the University of California-Riverside. The piece was adapted from a letter he wrote to colleagues and students announcing his resignation as chair of his department.

Writes Lutz:

In the space of less than a single lifetime, the University of California at Riverside went from being a small agricultural experiment station to one of the top 100 universities in the country. A dense and elaborate web of specialists across all fields of scholarship, science, and the arts was developed, and it took enormous efforts over those years to make it happen: countless hours in search-committee meetings followed by hundreds of thousands of hours of mentoring and reviewing; getting junior faculty financed; and, through tenure, building departments person by person, career by career. The best energies of thousands of people, year in and year out for 50 years.

In less than the four years that it used to take to graduate, this accomplishment is being destroyed.

Here, I think, is the heart of the piece:

The budget cuts of recent years and the ones we know for certain are coming next year mean a gross deterioration of our university. Those faculty who do leave for better jobs, or retire, or die in harness, are not being replaced. Staff who leave are not being replaced—the positions of those who are left are simply "reorganized." Students at Riverside are having increasing trouble getting the classes they need to graduate, and many of the classes they get will be crowded beyond responsible limits. Departments are being forced to abandon optimal class-size limits for classes two, three, and five times as large.

The library has virtually stopped buying books. We are on a race to become a mediocre university at best, and if the $500-million of proposed cuts in the university system turns into a billion dollars, as they are now discussing in Sacramento, we will be over. The billion-dollar cut translates into thousands of classes across the system. It means creative-writing workshops with 50 students, or, if we insist on maintaining reasonable workshop size, eight or 10 years to graduation for our majors. It means we will cease to be a real university, and will simply become another community-college-level institution at best. Then, maybe, after a few years, with tuition at $30,000 or $40,000 a year, we can begin the slow, arduous rebuilding into a real university, serving a small fraction of the population we now serve.

Why is this happening? Political demagoguery and corruption. Thirty-five years ago, the University of California received 6.6 percent of the state budget and prisons 3 percent. Now the university gets 2.2 percent and the prison-industrial complex gets 7.4 percent. The Legislature is taking the money that should be used to educate the best of its citizens and using it to enrich the people who make a profit from imprisoning the poorest. The percentage of the cost of higher education provided by the state has been cut in half, cut in half again, and is on the verge of getting cut in half a third time.

[emphasis mine-JM]

Of course, there are plenty of folks in the United States who would love to cut funds to prisons as well, if only it comes at the cost of further overcrowding prisoners. Anyone, it seems, who isn't wealthy or powerful enough to control the voters in DC is being cut out of the funding pie, and that most certainly includes the incarcerated as well.

It's funny—who was talking about the deficit in 2008? While the deficit is a serious issue, it's only become an object of daily concern since the Democrats gained control of the White House. Nobody was talking about the deficit when George W. Bush was cutting billions of dollars in taxes for the wealthiest Americans, or when he was starting wars that have cost us over $1 trillion. No, people have only begun to fret about the deficit now that there is a party in power which, to a small extent, seemed slightly more interested in spending money on infrastructure and regulation.

Obama, I think, shares a big part of the blame here. As I wrote a while back ago, rather than seizing the initiative on the deficit issue and getting us out of Afghanistan, he instead proposed across-the-board cuts on domestic spending. So nice to have a Democrat in office, eh? Especially one with a mandate for change.

For all its seriousness, the deficit furor in the United States is as big a canard as the Ergenekon trials in Turkey. In Turkey, the Ergenekon trials supposedly began as an effort to uncover the 'deep state' crimes committed by the state against Turkish citizens—Susurluk was going to be exposed once and for all!--but, surprise surprise, it's folks like Turkan Saylan who got called in for questioning instead of real deep-state figures like Sedat Bucak.

In the United States, meanwhile, the so-called deficit hawks are obsessing over the relative pennies doled to Planned Parenthood and the EPA while not batting an eye at the incredible sums that our country's continued occupation of Afghanistan—and the Department of Defense more generally—continue to eat up on a daily basis. As of nearly a month ago, our air-war against Libya had already cost, according to Defense Secretary Robert Gates, approximately $750 million.

The so-called deficit hawks are no more interested in cutting the deficit than the Ergenekon prosecutors were in uncovering the deep state. The war on the deficit is just a war on government regulatory agencies, as well as on organizations (like Planned Parenthood and NPR) that conservatives simply don't like.

As much as I criticize the AKP in the blog, it's telling that in Turkey there's widespread agreement among the political parties on the value of improving the country's infrastructure and education. No matter what happens in the elections, roads, schools, and other types of projects aimed at improving people's lives (as well as lining the pockets of the folks proposing them, it must be said) will continue to be undertaken. In the United States, however, both Republicans and Democrats seem to think that our infrastructure and education are so good we can keep cutting them.


Washington: Fighting for the rights of plutocrat donors

Brilliant, just brilliant.

But don't worry, folks, the money we're spending on war and occupation isn't just being thrown down the toilet. I'm sure it's ending up in somebody's pocket.

And the people benefiting from this won't be sending their kids to UC-Riverside, either.