Basic Necessities

I think about this term a lot. It seems so neatly to cover a finite category of needs. Food, shelter, water, and clothing. Gather these things and you'll stay alive. If you lack these things you'll start to suffer for the lack and eventually die. For years I've accepted this as a reasonable perodization of needs. I never considered the implications.

If we have basic necessities we also have nonbasic necessities. While the first group staves off death the second is still no less required for life. It is the difference between the emergency room to remove a rotten limb and a doctor to cure the infection. When politicians speak about necessities they somehow only ever consider the first category. I think this is because nonbasic necessities are by their nature less generalized and less universalizable. It's easy to say everyone needs food, and harder to say everyone needs the opportunity to make art. For some people art is so fundamentally imperative to their lives that they will choose art over food. Others fail to understand why you would pay millions of dollars for a painting even if it is an old painting by someone who was really good.

It's also unclear who bear responsibility for allowing access to nonbasic necessities. For the basics we tend to be comfortable accepting that government through food stamps, section 8, and some level of welfare should manage to provide access to the basic needs of its people. The generosity of these benefits varies, as does the rhetoric surrounding them. If someone needs advanced intellectual conversations who should pay for grad school or a career that allows them to exercise that need.

The nonbasic needs also do not seem to hasten death in the same way that basic needs do. At least not all the time. Electricity can be lived without successfully, and generally without shortening lifespan too dramatically. It, however, can also extend life miraculously. It is clearly a necessity for most people even if some by choice shun its presence and potential. Stranger still necessity requires some people to do without so that they can afford to manage their more basic necessities, i.e. not paying the electric bill so that you can pay the rent.

So what's the point? Nonbasic necessities are a thing. They exist. They are in reality the things that provide the best argument for an universal basic income. Cover the basic and nonbasic needs and leave people free to explore the life they have for all its potential. (There are other significant issues with UBI that I might consider at another point.) The nonbasic necessities make us human. The basic needs make us animals. Don't get me wrong, both are necessary. You can't discover humanity if you're not breathing. The thing is that it is from shared humanity that our best selves emerge. The basic assertion of rights requires shared humanity. Music, art, and literature demand shared experience as the conduit of communication. Democracy asserts a fundamental equality that over time has required an expanding definition of who is included. Religion, philosophy, science, and all other human endeavours have insisted that we exist as social creatures, and society requires that we recognize the shared humanity of at least some of those around us. (I'm a historian it's simply impossible to ignore the gross indignities and injustices we have visited on each other in the past. Yet even those required a definition of the downtrodden as something other than human. Possibly just barely not human, but still decidedly other.)

America and Israel

I like the idea of Israel. The idea that a perpetually persecuted people can find a stitch of land to develop into a haven for their self-protection and preservation is remarkable in a foolishly noble kind of way.

The application of the idea of Israel presents the fundamental error in the proposition. The founding of Israel happened only with the abuse and destruction of the existing populations in the Levant. The creation of a haven for one oppressed group created a new oppressed group, and did not actually save the original group from oppression.

Segregation, apartheid, and nationalism have proved remarkably incapable of protecting society or civilization from the most destructive human impulses. Instead of protecting and preserving these impulses have managed to focus the explosions, and in the process make them all the more destructive. The greatest strength of Homo Sapiens, the thing that has allowed the species to survive, develop, and describe the universe is the ability to function in community. Humans are social creatures, and by experiencing social life humans specialize and diversify; each individual developing according to natural proclivity, environment influence, cultural interests, and social expectations. The more divided humanity is the more imperiled humanity will find itself.

The idea and application of the state of Israel requires division and separation. Israel is what happened because integrationists failed to gain sway over the Zionist movement.

America has never been comfortable with integrationists. There is ample evidence of this in any number of places. Perhaps, this is part of the attraction between the US and Israel. The US sees itself, or shadows of itself, in the Israeli state. It is natural then that the impulse of policy makers is to protect the state and system that reminds us so viscerally of our own self-image. In doing so the US repeatedly accepts a more difficult foreign policy. The interests of the United States are materially harmed by the policies of the state of Israel. Worse yet now we have invited the prime minister of Israel to join in American domestic politics.

Instead of allowing politics to stop at the water’s edge, all issues everywhere are a chance to destroy a hated president. This, of course, is not new. Henry Cabot Lodge must be smiling in the afterlife. Regardless, if Israel is America’s best friend in the Middle East, then Netanyahu should have declined the invitation to speak before Congress. Israel should be neutral in American politics. Everyone in Congress, the UN, and the State Department already knows what Netanyahu thinks about the negotiations with Iran. There is no need or ability to further that message. The only meaning in the speech is political. If Israel is not America’s best friend in the Middle East, or at least no more of a friend than the rest of the Middle East, then America needs to pursue its own self-interest, which would benefit mightily from a recovered relationship with a stable Iran.

February 25 is Adjunct Walkout Day

I teach history as an adjunct professor. The wages are terrible. The hours are terrible. The working conditions tend to make the work harder. I have few if any means of recourse. Not many unions exist for adjunct faculty, and none of the schools I teach at are unionized in that way. I work a fourth job for near minimum wage to try to keep my bills paid. I’ve been asked many times, “Is there a chance that one of the schools you already teach at would hire you full time?” This is a normal question in the rest of the world. If you work hard and produce good results you can expect to be promoted or to move to a better position. I am good at what I do. I teach well, and I have hundreds of students who have learned a lot from my classes. I will also never be hired or promoted by the schools I work for. They already have access to what I can offer them.

The general outlook of an adjunct is pretty depressing, but what makes it intolerable are the insults.

I live in a state where a few nights ago the governor announced in his state of the state address that he was adding a new member to a commission charged with reducing the cost of higher education. Not a terrible idea, but the inability of the governor to escape that section of the speech without threatening higher educators that if the commission was unsuccessful the state legislature and the governor would simply be draconian in cutting. (Though I don’t think my governor could define the word draconian let alone use it in a sentence… needless to say I am paraphrasing his speech.)

For that matter, the governor of Wisconsin thinks professors are lazy. (I think he only intended to insult tenured or tenure tracked professors, but his comments were phrased too broadly so he instead insulted all professors at all levels of higher education.)

A few years ago, administrators at one of the schools I teach at blamed adjunct professors for making bad career choices as he cut their hours. This was in the middle of the brouhaha over reducing adjunct hours to avoid providing health benefits. The galling nature of this fight nationally was that administrators seemed to expect adjuncts to blame the president for requiring health care; instead of blaming the administrators for cutting hours and thus providing smaller incomes and still no benefits.

Just as bad in the middle of the same health care debate, one of the catholic schools that I teach at made it clear that they would find it morally objectionable to provide health insurance that covered birth control. (They said this without conceding any ground for birth control used to treat medical conditions.) At the same time they found no problem in defying their own churches teachings in regard to fair pay, unionization, and general human equality.

So on February 25^th I did not walk out. I watched, and I asked how much longer I can allow myself to exist in an environment that treats me with such contempt while it depends on my exuberant efforts for survival. I do not kid myself. One day of some walkouts at colleges will not change the culture or policies in higher education. A trickle of adjuncts leaving academia will not change the situation, though beginning in April and continuing through at least June The Chronicle of Higher Education, Slate.com, and a number of other news outlets will carry public letters written by those leaving the life of the adjunct for greener pastures. Only massive change will adjust the climate within higher education. If 100,000 adjuncts left teaching before next fall, that might work. If congress dramatically raised the minimum wage, that might help. If accreditation agencies started revoking the credentials of schools that relied too heavily on adjuncts that might serve the purpose.

I do not expect any of that to happen though…

My name is Lucius, and I am an adjunct professor

I have worked as contingent faculty for three and a half years. In that time I have finished my dissertation, and graduated with a Ph.D. in history. For a significant period of that time my wife and I received food stamps. For the last year and a half I have worked at three colleges: two Catholic schools and one state university. I have taught roughly twice what would be considered a full time load. For that effort I earn about $20,000 a year. Driving between the schools I work at this semester I have put 10,000 miles on my car. I receive no benefits. I have not in my life had health insurance. I have no savings for retirement. None of the schools offer funds for contingent faculty to attend conferences, conduct research, or develop my credentials. At one of the schools I have no office. I have been asked by that same school if I would be willing to volunteer for committee work. Committee work would typically be part of the responsibilities of full time faculty. The likelihood of turning one of the part time jobs into a full time job is non-existent.

From one semester to the next I do not have a guarantee of work. A good example of this was my experience last summer. The state school I work at assigned me to a summer section of Modern Middle Eastern history. This helped my financial outlook a lot; since I would otherwise not have been paid over the summer. Enrollment for the class was very low, about six, and it was cancelled. A mistake was made, and I only received official word that the class would not go forward when I called the department the morning of the first class session. This failure of notification was clearly not part of university policy, but because I am a contingent faculty member it is much easier for me to slip through the cracks.

At two of the school I work at I have access to office assistance, though my schedule ends up demanding so much that I often cannot make use of that assistance because I cannot be sure that I can provide office workers enough time to reasonably accomplish my requests. This would typically involve something as simple as making copies.

The administrations of the schools I work at have little interest in my abilities or efforts. The most typical interaction I have with administrators is when they announce their new program to enhance the student experience. Ironically, they could enhance this experience dramatically by paying me a living wage, so I could focus on teaching half as many students as I am now.

My wife and I have spoken several times about the long term prospects of this line of work. We struggle to stay current on our mortgage. She is disabled with MS so my income is the only one with any potential to grow, but the number of tenure track jobs in history has not grown in several years, and I am one amongst hundreds applying for open jobs. For a few more years we might be able to manage on adjunct pay, but to make ends meet I am working more than I can physically, mentally, or professionally keep up with.

I am a better teacher than my jobs allow. My students suffer because I am not able to take the time to revise my lectures before I teach them. I do not have the time to stay current with literature outside of my immediate field. I am forced to keep office hours and emails as brief as possible, and while I would quite willingly read drafts of my student's papers I don't have the time to do so.

The current use of contingent faculty by institutions of higher education fails the students, professors, and future employers. While the current use of contingent faculty helps the bottom line at schools around the nation, I am devalued by these practices.

America is broke...

This simple sentence has become something of a mantra. The figure who says it politely pauses to let the harsh reality of this accepted truth sink in on the listeners, and so that the listeners can think there is a public personal with character.

I imagine what it must be for someone from a less fortunate nation to hear these stark proclamations from American figures. Here is a nation with economic resource the likes of which have never before been seen in human history. Here is a nation with individuals who can literally buy an entire "third world" nation. It is like someone complaining to a blind man about how ugly a city is, or a person complaining that their steak was overcooked to people at a soup kitchen.

Trying to get my thoughts together 1

I grew up poor. My family was not scrounging for food out of dumpsters, but we would cut the mold off a piece of cheese and use food past the expiration date. We lived in a trailer that needed substantial repair, and had cars that barely got you from point A to B. We never took vacations. The closest thing to a vacation I can remember was the one trip to Wisconsin we made for my Grandfather’s funeral. We did not receive any government assistance, but we should have.

Freewill?

This past Sunday a woman gave a sermonette before reading the first lesson at church. In this she stated that she had always struggled with explaining free will. I can't tell you the rest of what she was saying or the specific context of that comment since I was annoyed that she did not simply read the lesson and sit down so I was not paying much attention. The comment though stuck with me since as I view the world free will rests at the foundation of all moral behavior, and the fundamental requirement for existence to have meaning.

So how can I demonstrate, explain, prove, or validate my profound attachment to free will?
After all, theoretically the attachment could be explained as the end result of multiple stimuli that informed an otherwise forgone conclusion, and that as such any individual placed in exactly the same sets of conditions would reach exactly the same conclusion. Thus, no free will because I am no more than the end result of cause and effect. A complex chain of events to be sure, but I am subject and slave to it nonetheless.

I think this is crap, and I have to start with the assumption that God exists.[1] I really see no point in excluding any kind of spiritual divinity in this discussion since the only assumption I need is for God to exist with the ability to create. God by being himself creates the universe, all that is, was and will be. Great... why does God do this?[2] The typical definition of God is that he is omnipotent, omniscient, and generally self-sufficiently bad ass. So why bother with the intensely laborious task of creating all that is, was and will be? I have only one attempt at an answer.
Can God know what it is to not be God? To have choice, intellect, and the power to manipulate your environment, but not know the outcome of your action before you take them; to have free will, and not have omniscience. Can God know what it is to not be God? Yes, he created mankind as the answer to that question. Moreover, he has attempted to offer mankind the elements that would let us conclude, without omniscience, what God already knows. The best possible action is to love everything and everyone, always.  

Mankind has the choice to ignore this message, and we often do. We also have a certain inability to grasp the exponential complexity of our tiniest actions. The choices to work, consume, and interact with the world around us have enormous power that we simply cannot perceive. It is thus that man has the choice to act communally or individually, and through this choice possesses an understanding of that most individual and fickle sense; morality.

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[1] Seriously though, if God does not exist free will must be assumed as it denies the existence of any entity that would tamper with independence. So as I consider free will I do so with the acceptance of a divine entity.

[2] By the way without engaging in another distracting tangential argument, I really don’t think it matters how God created the universe. Certainly for this bit of musing it couldn’t matter less so evolution, magic, creationism, or a bird that laid a golden egg take your pick.