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.

***

More info on the California State University situation:

Chancellor fights for the Perks

Faculty Sues CSU over Perks

Progressive economist Jared Bernstein has written an article about economic policy that has strong affinities with Fuller’s position on dignity as a unifying value for the Democratic party. The article is reprinted below with permission.

The YOYO Handcuffs
By Jared Bernstein

Here’s a test: name one economic policy, other than tax cuts, associated with outgoing Treasury Secretary John Snow.

Give up?

Now think about this: what is the economic policy of the Bush administration? What about the Congress? What about the Democrats?

If all you could come up is that the first two aforementioned groups want to cut rich people’s taxes, I’m with you. Beyond that, none of the above has offered a coherent strategy for meeting America’s economic challenges.

And these problems are prodigious: global economic competition; 46 million people lacking health insurance; the seemingly inexorable climb of inequality; obscene CEO compensation packages totally unrelated to performance; an economy that’s doing fine, until you consider the people in it.

Each of these problems needs concerted thought and action. But while the administration’s new nominee for Treasury Secretary, Henry Paulson, is certainly an able economist, he will likely be as ineffectual as was Secretary Snow.

There’s a reason why the nation’s economic policymakers are suffering from a deficit of ideas: It’s YOYO economics.

YOYO is an acronym for “You’re on your own,” and it is the guiding light of economic policy as practiced today. The idea is that no matter what the problem is, the solution is less government and more markets.  You’ve seen many examples of YOYOism in action, but here’s a primer:

Problem: The looming health care crisis.

YOYO solution: individualized Health Savings Accounts, designed to create better “health care shoppers.”

Problem: The economic insecurity associated with globalization.

YOYO solution: more education. If you’re not smart enough to compete with cheaper, skilled workers abroad, well, “you’re on your own.”

Problem: Solvency in your old age.

YOYO solution: Try your hand in the stock market with a private account.

And underlying all of this is the biggest YOYO tactic of all: cut taxes to the point where government is forced to contract so there’s no question of an activist agenda. If you can enrich your donors along the way…well, then it’s a “twofer.”

The problem is, as is becoming undeniably clear, YOYOism doesn’t work. It failed lethally in New Orleans. It’s done nothing to stop the growth of the uninsured, the rise in poverty, the decline in median earnings (i.e., the real earnings of the typical worker, down 2% over the recovery, while productivity is up 15%), nor the rise in the profit share of national income, now at a 39-year high.  The public rejected it with the failure of the Bush-push to privatize Social Security, and now the polls show deep dissatisfaction with the president’s management of the economy.

There’s a countervailing message rising out of the anxiety generated by the new economy:

“Policy makers, work with us. We’re in this together. Rebuild a government that we can believe in, and we will do so. Conceive and articulate an agenda that harnesses the tremendous capacity, skill, and flexibility of our economy to meet the challenges. Instead of creating 300 million individual risk-bearing silos, let’s pool risk though universal health insurance coverage and a strengthened pension system. Let’s build an ambitious public/private partnership with the goal of energy independence to replace the jobs and wages lost to globalization.”

You have to strain to hear this message, but it’s there. It is, however, in desperate need of amplification.  The new treasury secretary can’t help–his hands are tied by YOYO ideology. So the question is: who will step up and amplify this liberating message?

One of the interesting arguments in Crashing the Gate is that the progressive organizations offer their employees a sense of moral superiority to compensate for poor pay (exacerbated by crushing debts). However, the exercise of that moral superiority offends the very disenfrachised poor that progressives seek to represent.

The discussion of the moral-superiority-instead-of-pay trade off should be extended far beyond the operation of political parties. Academia should shoulder a huge part of the blame for recasting moral superiority as pay. For instance, in the University of California system, where doctoral students are dramatically underfunded and at high risk for attrition, the graduate student instructors at U.C. Berkeley have attempted to strike for better pay. The response of the university administration has always been to whip up parental outrage and make a moral claim that teaching is a spiritual calling. Many departments parcel out the scarce teaching positions so that graduate students only get an income for one semester out of the year: when students question the expectation that they take out loans to make up the difference (steadily adding up over the course of 10+ years), administrators tell them that they should just be happy they got into such a competitive university. Meanwhile tenured professors get the benefit of exploiting their students’ professional skillset for a fraction of market value. This is a moral-superiority-instead-of-pay argument. As the University of California pushes their no-pay-for-calling message year after year, while drawing a student body with a strong commitment to social justice, is it any wonder the products of that education have been conditioned to expect moral positioning as a substitute for pay?

While university administers admonish teachers for being overly-concerned about money, a series of investigations and audits have recently revealed that the executives in the University of California system were wildly over-compensated. It’s hard for those underpaid, steeped-in-moral-entitlement workers that academia has been pumping out to ignore this level of hypocrisy. The rich are apparently getting richer while manipulating the moral values of struggling students.

Another tributary stream of the moral para-economy occurs in the gendered approach to compensation in the corporate world. Women are highly susceptible to moral arguments to discriminate against themselves in salary negotiations. While it’s easy to blame individual women for failing to stick up for themselves, the sheer force of numbers suggest that women en masse have been encouraged to view opportunities for moral superiority as a tempting substitute for monetary pay.

The moral para-economy can be viewed as an aspect of the problem of rankism. No matter how much the powers and the interests try to convince people of their inherent inferiority in order to exploit their lowered expectations, the hallmark of progressive civilization is the underlying assumption that we all have equal value as human beings. As financial and social inequalities escalate, the demand for moral privilege expands to compensate. As the beneficiaries of material inegalitarianism defend their advantages, the moral claims get louder. In this respect, it doesn’t matter whether your gang colors are Red or Blue: poor Republicans and poor Democrats both demand the moral high ground to compensate for the material distortions of our society.

If Democrats are still looking for a core value that everyone can get behind, it’s worth considering rankism as a primary threat to building an inclusive “reality-based” community.

Thank you Chetan Dhruve for pointing out this recent Harvard study on the ubiquity of poor management. As Dhruve points out, the Harvard solutions are a bit pedestrian, and they might actually contribute to demotivation if the over-inspirational manager comes across as a fake and a manipulator.

In other news, it’s not often that you see a coach sanctioned for bullying.

I just found out that the rich now pay promoters such as IvyWise to get their children into Ivy League schools. This makes me sick to my stomach.

I grew up in a poor rural area, with little access to the bells and whistles that wealthy children have access to as a matter of course. Even back then, I was disturbed by the fact that children of the rich could afford coaching for the SATs and exotic extracurricular activities. Now the rich are paying for total packaging, engineering their children into the elite position in society that Ivy League colleges underwrite. The Ivy League colleges seem to be complicit in this railroading of the poor, and Harvard has been among the worst offenders.

Recently I’ve been reading some mea culpas from various universities that promise more outreach to the poor. I don’t think this outreach is good enough. Applicants should be penalized for making use of promoters to game the system. At the same time, poor applicants should be recognized for their efforts to swim upstream at a time when the current has turned so strongly against them.

Update: This whole situation should cast suspicion how the major competitive scholarships such as the Truman, Mellon, and Rhodes are being awarded as well. These scholarships are major signifiers of “merit” which often determine admission to leading graduate schools.

If there’s one aspect of civic life that’s essential to democracy, it’s significant obstacles in attaining this fundamental promise of democratic society. The resulting irony is that rural youth feel less engaged with the democratic process while their sketchy education leaves them vulnerable to political propaganda. Urbanized pundits rarely show any understanding, much less sympathy, in regard to the entrenched inequities that underwrite rural fury.

While the President sloganizes over No Child Left Behind, legislators are now wrangling over funding, teachers are preparing to flee, and pundits are counting out the contradictions. Meanwhile, the President’s mother is using education as a front to enrich the Bush family, while the rural reality is crashing through the rhetoric in the form of the parade of rural youth herded into the military for lack of other options.

I grew up in a tiny rural town, and I spent the majority of my time there trying to figure out how to escape into the land of urbanized wonders I saw on TV. While Pell Grants were starting to make college a bridge to the city, it was still difficult for rural children to meet minimal academic criteria because of the lack qualified teachers. Just moving to an urban area required a substantial upfront investment that most rural families just didn’t have. The majority of the scholarship funding ironically goes to the children of wealthy families, who can afford private schools, tutors, special extracurricular and internship activities, and coaching for standardized tests. This scholarship welfare for the rich is often disguised in the rhetoric of merit, and colleges are only starting to view this gap as their responsibility.

I used to collect military brochures from the school library and try to weigh the onus of basic training requirements against the opportunities offered by various branches. However, through a series of exceedlingly unlikely twists of fate, I got to go directly to college. I made a beeline for the city and never looked back. I admit I continue to think of urban life as a superior experience.

Things will never be fair for rural areas as long as cities set the standard of civilization. Rural children get “left behind” because they’re in a physical geopolitical location that keeps them on the far fringes of this country’s social and economic networks. One thing that might alleviate the inequity is a “Project Remix” where rural children are given the chance to live in urban areas for extended periods of time and matched with mentors. In the era of big media, it’s no longer possible to downplay the unfairness by hiding how the richer half lives. If they’re offered access to urban networks, however, perhaps rural children will become conduits that will recirculate educational benefits and economic opportunities back into rural areas. Life might be unfair, but all it would take is a little good will to make it better for great numbers of rural poor.

For the last 48 hours there has been much confusion as bloggers and journalists attempted to confirm the story of a boy who committed suicide after the vice principal of his school threatened him with extended prison time after he organized a student protest against the recently considered anti-immigrant legislation in Washington, D.C. The press release quickly circulated on the Internet, but for some reason it wasn’t reported by the mainstream media. Because of the timing (April Fools Day) and the lack of mainstream media confirmation, people naturally entertained the possibility it could be a hoax - possibly an attempt to spawn an urban legend that would rally people around the immigration issue. However, as people sought out confirmation from the police, the Church, and the representatives of the family listed on the press release, the tragedy finally began to be reported in smaller press venues and radio news segments.

At this hour, there still doesn’t seem to be any coverage by the mainstream media. This astounds me. Not only is it important to illuminate the damage that can be done by authoritarian responses to protest, it’s in the public’s interest to gain insight in how the immigration issues are playing out in the lives of real people. I don’t understand why the mainstream media ignored this story, and I have more than a little suspicion that it was deliberately suppressed for its inflammatory potential - particularly because it’s inflammatory in ways that the stereotypical white middle class newspaper readership probably doesn’t want to hear about. It’s also possible that the reporters were all waiting for some top dog to cover it first, and the longer it remained unreported, the more unimportant it seemed.

What bothers me here is that the failure of the media compounded the tragedy. Because the Internet rumor couldn’t be confirmed by authoritative stories, many people just denied it out of hand. The people who supplied the press release were denigrated and attacked for purveying a possible hoax. The few confirmation points (the police, the Church, etc.) were bombarded with inquiries, diverting their attention from other matters. If the intention of the media was to suppress the story, it now seems more likely that they’ve only provided the fuel for a gigantic backlash.

Worst of all, the controversy over the (lack of) media response may overshadow the importance of the incident itself, where one of the most important authority figures in a child’s life, the vice principal of his school, engaged in an alarmingly rankist abuse of power to suppress the exercise of First Amendment rights. Constitutional protections that U.S. citizens have long taken for granted have been increasingly eroded in recent years. The most vulnerable people in society are the first to suffer: they are leading edge indicators for declining defense of the Constitution, much as dying frogs signal radical shifts in the environment. When the mainstream media does finally report this story, I hope they will take on the issue of how rankism in the schools betrays the most basic value of a democratic society, the individual rights and freedoms guaranteed by our Constitution.

If the results from a University of Maine study can be construed as representative of university life in the U.S., more than one in five students have witnessed hazing. A quick glance at the news reveals a surprising number of hazing incidents (including the hazing murder of an Iraq veteran), and efforts to protect the victims through enlightened policies and legislation. Here is a good general resouce on hazing.

Apart from protecting the victim, I think the high numbers of witnesses who apparently do little or nothing call for a renewed public discussion about the bystander effect. This is a difficult topic to bring up, especially if you’re trying to point out and prevent the Bystander Effect in progress. In my experience, anyone who is part of the Bystander group will have a knee-jerk defensive reaction to the implied accusation rather than using the information to redirect their attention and help the victim. Perhaps what we also need is a social pact that makes it safe for people to bring up a Bystander issue: i.e., no hostility, retaliation, ostracization, or attempts to turn the group against the person who dares to point out Bystander behavior. The Bystander Effect is real, and a quick glance at all the news stories about hazing shows that people are getting hurt and even killed because of the social obstacles to intervention.

An interesting Wisconsin State Journal article argues that the Left and the Right are uniting in opposition to the Bully video game. It would be interesting to see if there’s a line between supporters and opponents that can be drawn elsewhere. For instance, would the positions reflect a generational divide? Or perhaps the battle over Bully is defined by economic as opposed to political positions: is this a free market vs. planned economy showdown?

I’m personally still in favor of parents choosing not to buy the game instead of banning it. I think it’s providing a terrific focus for conversation about bullying.

Also, I learned today that 160,000 students have reported skipping out on school because they fear being bullied. I wonder how this number would look if other strategies to avoid bullying were factored in. For instance, my father drove me every day to a school in another town for my senior year in high school to dissuade me from dropping out of my hometown school. I was bullied extensively as a classic chess nerd - though it was probably more of a problem that the social status of my family and my dollar store clothes didn’t match my upper class-ish abilities and interests. Nothing drives people crazier than a person that’s difficult to categorize.

I often wonder if the mass unsettling of categories isn’t the root of a lot of reactionary politics today. A lot of people have attempted to assert equality without any financial ground to stand on since the 60s: this probably looks like chaos from the perspective of the traditionally privileged. No wonder our government and the media are looking for any rationale - scientific or religious or judicial - to put people “in their place”. A banner example is Tom Delay’s shifty agenda for moral fitness. For the reader’s benefit, here’s a defition of “moral fitness” from a philosophy web site:

Moral fitness theory is a rationalist theory that includes the notion that the human mind is able to grasp the various moral relations that result from the essential natures of things in the universe; e.g., the nature of humans and God creates a relation that necessitates the allegiance of humans to their superior (this view was made most famous by Samuel Clarke).

The idea of “moral fitness” probably sounds comforting to the people dismayed by the confusion and contradictions of the modern world. However, I imagine it’s a lot more comforting for those who deem themselves to be the “superiors” than those who are shoved into the class obliged to proffer a natural “allegiance.”

A friend of mine just sent me an excellent New York Times article about the social bullying in the court room. Given the popular faith in equality under the law, it’s surprising how little judges seem to care about how financial and social bars have effectively limited access to a fair hearing to the wealthy. In the U.S., the court system has become a parasite that feeds on the rich and shrugs off the poor. As an instrument to enforce the will of the upper class, the courts are shortening the path to a plutocracy, and, increasingly, a kleptocracy.

The saddest irony is that cutbacks in prison education programs are contributing to the growth of the destitute class.