I’m shaking with anger right now.

After a week of storm and stress, the Board of Trustees of the California State Univeristy system has vote to merely scale back the one-year-of-pay-for-no-work golden parachute for top Univesity administrators. Why do these scions of the super-privileged think they are entitled to a public subsidy of hundreds of thousands of dollars?

…the perk is vital because it allows “a dignified way” for CSU executives, including campus presidents, to step down from their well-compensated positions.

Well, I have a thing or two to say, nay SCREAM, about treating dignity as a perk of the executive lifestyle.

First, you’d think the dignity that comes with raking in a salary 35x the minimum wage (or more) would be enough. When you earn several hundred thousand dollars a year, you get a nice house, nice clothes, nice gadgets, a nice car. All those status symbols encourage others to defer to you. You don’t have to approach people for favors - people approach you because doing you favors might get them into the crony circle.

And there’s not much need for a golden parachute when one executive job is likely to lead to another one. So you don’t get to be SVP of Lockheed for a while? On $300,000 you could live like retiree on Social Security for 15-20 years and enjoy the fishing. But why even use that principle when your time in the executive suite stuffed your pension stocking?

And let’s not forget how the UC executives acquired their positional power in the first place: most of them dined off the tall white male advantage all their lives.

For the love of Mike, Pete, and the Magdalen! Wrong, wrong, wrong…

Now let’s talk about who the salary-padded UC executive is STEALING from. The U.C. graduate schools are extremely poorly endowed. In the humanities, where time to dissertation can run over ten years, most students are lured in with a year of fellowship funding and then forced to to take out tens of thousands of dollars in loans (on top of work that may or may not be related to their academic progress) in order to get their Ph.D. When I was in graduate school, I took out these loans and worked for several years as an eldercare assistant - and I still didn’t end up with my doctorate because a powerful department administrator sneakily transferred a fellowship I had been nominated for to a student he preferred: and by the time I found out, it was too late to make other arrangements. I was in such a precarious position that I couldn’t cope with the months of bureaucracy once my department wouldn’t immediately correct the situation. My hair was already gray from several starvation periods. My life had been reduced to an eternal round of humiliating and hopeless meetings with profs who had already decided the current was against me. Was there a plan in place to transition out of grad school in a DIGNIFIED way? No, I left grad school to temp around, and generally fail at the rest of my life.

No doubt this story can be echoed by many graduate students chewed up and spit out by the UC system.

And let’s talk about the working poor, whose underpay subsidizes the lifestyle of the self-absorbed jet set. Does America give a fig about the dignity of the millions of people who sweep their floors, wash their clothes, change the diapers on their babies, and harvest their food? No - we’re all freaked out that our taxes might go toward the janitor’s entitlements. Oh the horror!

Well if entitlements for the poor are a moral hazard, then entitlements for the rich are the crying shame of our times. Dignity isn’t a perk of celebrity and attention: it’s a universal human right, and we need to start restoring it from the bottom up.

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More info on the California State University situation:

Chancellor fights for the Perks

Faculty Sues CSU over Perks