The Quasi-Sentient Professor

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stepford

Cross-posted at Daily Kos.

A few weeks ago, a friend and colleague who works in a creative discipline at the very fine but underfunded non-flagship state university where I work as a professor of linguistics told me about a recent conversation she’d had with a senior administrator at our institution, in which he had explained to her with apparent enthusiasm that the university will have computers that will be able to do her job in 10 to 15 years.

A day or two later, another friend who is also an academic, although unlike me she is at a small, decently funded private liberal-arts college, posted a status on Facebook expressing her frustration over a lengthy outage of her college’s online Learning Management System, or LMS (a phrase that I use here with all due mockery). The outage interfered with the ability of her students to submit their assignments on time as well as with her ability to access their work, respond to it, and provide grades and feedback according to the schedule she had set out.

And then last Thursday, this article showed up in the New York Times, unironically titled “Essay-Grading Software Offers Professors a Break.” It caught my eye initially because of the unintentionally if grimly hilarious headline. I thought the idea of a potentially permanent “break” for professors from doing our, you know, jobs had to be a joke, with a punchline that probably involved the unemployment line.

As I read about this magical software, especially in the context of those two exchanges with my colleagues and some other recent developments in educational technology, it got me thinking once again about the future of higher education in this country, a topic I take upevery so often in this space, only this time the result is what I hope turns out to be nothing more than a particularly vivid paranoid fantasy on my part.

(Note: In my defense, there have been times when things have in fact come to pass that I also thought — hoped — were merely paranoid fantasies.)

As you are undoubtedly aware, there’s been a lot of buzz and a lot of enthusiasm out there recently about a new model for higher education in the form of online course offeringsdesigned to serve tens of thousands of students at a time, with the ostensible goal of bringing higher education to the masses by offering free enrollment to virtually (see what I did there?) everyone on the planet with an internet connection. While it is only fair to point out that some of the enthusiasm is coming from known yutzes who enjoy well-earnedreputations for being wrong about pretty much everything, there is also plenty frompeople who ought to know better.

Known in the EduBiz as “MOOCs,” which in education parlance stands for Massive Open Online Courses (to distinguish it from how it is understood in other parlances), these mass-enrollment courses are already being offered by several elite universities (elite as in highly selective and jaw-droppingly expensive), which are developing and offering the courses in partnership with what I am going to call content vendors, all of them privateand some of them for-profit. The enrollees get what they are paying for in terms of thecredit hours they earn, which is to say they earn none, at least for now.

As a professor, I’ve had occasion to think quite a lot about MOOCs lately (not to mention about the mooks who are helping the industry with its marketing). And as a professor, but also as a citizen and taxpayer, I have some thoughts about what these developments in the bravenew world of online higher education might come to mean for the old-school kind ofhigher education, the kind in which actual students attend actual classes at an actual university and interact with actual faculty.

I am pretty skeptical that significant cost savings for states and institutions are likely to result from the increasing emphasis on online “education.” What seems far more likely is more shifting of support away from students and public institutions as public money is diverted into private pockets. (As of this writing, the California state legislature is considering a bill to require public universities in that state to accept credits from online courses offered by for-profit vendors. As Jon Wiener put it in a March 14 article in The Nation,“Here’s how California treats its public colleges and universities: first, cut public funds, and thus classes; then wait for over-enrollment, as students are unable to get the classes they need to graduate; finally, shift classes online, for profit.”)

The well-funded march toward significantly expanded roles in higher education for MOOCs and other educational technologies is likely to come at enormous cost to the students, faculty, and staff at non-elite institutions, which serve 97% of college students in the U.S., by reducing the non-virtual options for them (but not for the affluent), thereby exacerbatingan already highly problematic two-Americas class divide in higher education. In a December 2012 article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Scott Carlson and Goldie Blumenstyk make this pointed observation about some of the “MOOC revolution‘s” most visible fanboys:

The pundits and disrupters, many of whom enjoyed liberal-arts educations at elite colleges, herald a revolution in higher education that is not for people like them or their children, but for others: less-wealthy, less-prepared students who are increasingly cut off from the dream of a traditional college education.

Carlson and Blumenstyk quote David Stavens, one of the founders of the for-profit ed-tech start-up Udacity, who earned his undergraduate degree at Princeton and graduate degrees at Stanford, and who told Time magazine last October that “there’s a magic that goes on inside a university campus that, if you can afford to live inside that bubble, is wonderful.”

“But if you can’t,” say Carlson and Blumenstyk,

entrepreneurs like [Stavens] are creating an industrialized version of higher education that the most fervent disruptionists predict could replace mid-sized state institutions or less-selective private colleges.

The ubiquity of the practically evangelical zeal for the MOOC as the answer to the “problem”of higher education, which of course is not at all the problem they think it is, and the increasing emphasis on and expectation that faculty and students will use LMSs that in the experience of lot of their users so far seem to be little more than obnoxious, cumbersome “solutions” to a problem that doesn’t exist, unless you count the entrepreneurial problem of how to find new ways to make money by squeezing it out of struggling students and underfunded colleges and universities like mine.

Of course I am well aware that MOOCs and Learning Management Systems are not the same thing. But the connections are clear and obvious. Let’s see if I can parse them out.

I’ll start with the LMS my institution uses, which touts its productes and services thusly:

Breaking down barriers to education, obsessing over the learning and instructor experience, and focusing on an open and extensible platform, we have built a tightly integrated suite of products that is providing a more engaging, intuitive and personalized learning experience than ever before. We provide a seamless experience for creation, delivery and management of courses, allowing users to collaborate and connect around content and activities. From simple to sophisticated, we support a variety of learning environments limited only by the vision of the educational institution.

I think most professors consider “providing an engaging, intuitive and personalized learning experience” to be very much a part of our job descriptions. In addition to the scholarly work those of us at research universities are also obliged to do, the “creation, delivery and management of courses” describes precisely a significant component of what professors do for a living. And yet we seem to be farming that work out to a company that does not actually seem to be doing it. (If they’re “obsessing” over my experience, this is the first I am hearing about it.)

The sentiment my friend expressed in her Facebook post in response to the crash of her institution’s Learning Management System at a critical time was nothing unusual. A lot of us in what is becoming the EduBiz can recount similar and numerous examples of platform failures and the ensuing angst on the parts of students and faculty.

Oh, have I mentioned that my friend’s class is not an “online” course? And that neither are most of the courses my colleagues and I teach but for which we are expected to use LMSs? Our classes meet in the traditional way, meaning in a classroom on a regular schedule, with students and a professor in the same place at the same time.

And so what (finally) struck me after years of hearing frequent and similar technological tales of woe from students and from colleagues was that whether we’re talking about my friend’s decently funded private liberal arts college or my perpetually underfunded nonflagship state university, even our old-school, “traditional,” in-person courses, as distinct from courses that are taught partly or completely online, are moving toward models in which we — students and instructors — are increasingly expected to participate in electronic interfaces in order to submit course work (students), access student work (us), provide feedback and grades (us), and access said feedback and grades (students). We’ve added an extra layer to our own workloads, or rather, had one added, and to the workloads of our students by imposing the online submission-and-feedback platform on them and between us. And our universities are both paying private vendors a boatload of money for the pleasure.

So, what is the LMS for? Why are we using it? Why are we using technologies that intrude into our interactions with students without reducing anyone’s workload but rather adding to it in the form of often user-unfriendly, stress-inducing, time-wasting frustrations, andsurveillance-enabling systems that hardly anyone on my campus seems to like except for administrators who don’t actually have to use them? Where is the evidence that these systems are actually improving instructional quality or learning experiences or outcomes in any demonstrable, documentable ways, that this is something other than just the latest look-busy, look-like-you’re-fixing-some-problem administrative/private-sector boondoggle?

It is hard not to imagine that we are all, students and faculty alike, essentially functioning as unwitting, uncompensated, and non-consenting participants in massive beta testing ofcommercial online platforms, the most successful of which are venture-capitalized, withreturn on investment (and then some) anticipated to come via student tuition dollars, even if some (but by no means all) of the products are “free” for the time being.

This brings us back to the magic grading software, brought to a college near you by EdX, aprivate non-profit which is of course one of the “big three” MOOC developers. The machine-scoring software “uses artificial intelligence to grade student essays and short written answers.” But human beings are not quite obsolete in the process of responding to student writing. The NYT reports:

The EdX assessment tool requires human teachers, or graders, to first grade 100 essays or essay questions. The system then uses a variety of machine-learning techniques to train itself to be able to grade any number of essays or answers automatically and almost instantaneously.

In other words, the software needs to be “trained” by sentient beings, who initially do the work themselves until the application catches on and and can do the work itself. That must be what the senior administrator who announced to my colleague that a computer would be able to do her job in a decade or so meant when he said computer would learn its trade — make that my colleague’s trade — from the colleague who would be training it (and perhaps ultimately herself out of a job).

The other money quote is this one:

EdX, the nonprofit enterprise founded by Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to offer courses on the Internet, has just introduced such a system and will make its automated software available free on the Web to any institution that wants to use it.

I have strong feelings of my own about the efficacy and ethics of machine scoring (as do many others), but at the moment they are peripheral to the cause of my larger unease. I promised you a paranoid fantasy, and I intend to deliver. Here it is:

The magical grading software is described in the NYT article as a tool for “freeing professors for other tasks” (such as filing for unemployment benefits). Everyone who’s ever taught knows how labor-intensive, time-consuming, and draining it can be to engage with student writing, at least if you’re doing it right, and I would not blame anyone who has to do it on a regular basis for being tempted by the possibility that there might be software that could help ease a workload that can become overwhelming. Leaving aside for the moment thehumanistic and ethical arguments against the use of machine scoring, which are legitimate and compelling, there is another serious ethical question, and it has to do with what the developers might be getting in return.

I’m talking about data: the data that students and instructors generate in the course of using these products and platforms, including MOOCs, LMSs, machine-grading software, and whatever else might be coming next. These platforms need human input to work and to improve. The senior administrator told my colleague that the software he was all excited about would learn to do her job because she would teach it to do her job. EdX’s grading software needs instructors to teach it to grade. Of course it’s free. How in the hell else would they get anyone to use it?

And don’t even get me started on these insane surveillance-enabled e-books now being tested at Texas A&M. According to an article in Tuesday’s New York Times, professors using the new digital-book technology can monitor the extent to which students in their classes are doing the assigned reading:

They know when students are skipping pages, failing to highlight significant passages, not bothering to take notes — or simply not opening the book at all.They, along with colleagues at eight other colleges, are testing technology from a Silicon Valley start-up, CourseSmart, that allows them to track their students’ progress with digital textbooks.

Major publishers in higher education have already been collecting data from millions of students who use their digital materials. But CourseSmart goes further by individually packaging for each professor information on all the students in a class — a bold effort that is already beginning to affect how teachers present material and how students respond to it, even as critics question how well it measures learning. The plan is to introduce the program broadly this fall.

OK, never mind that I exactly ZERO interest in trying to micromanage how and when the students in my classes do the reading and whether they highlight or not or anything else that is inappropriately invasive, not to mention that it would be one more massive time-suck for instructors to contend with. Instead, can I just say please make this stop already? I started writing this post on Sunday, and today is Thursday, and I can’t get it finished because every day there is some new announcement of some new kind of intrusion into the work that students and instructors are trying to get done if these bastards would just leave us the hell alone already and get over their obsession with how we are doing it and when we are doing it and how they can monetize it even more! and at this rate, I am at serious risk of becoming the blogging equivalent of the contractor who got the Winchester House bid if the line doesn’t get drawn somehow, preferably now-ish. (But no.)

Anyway, I am not talking about personal information or privacy issues, necessarily (although there are potentially serious issues with that as well). I am talking about private companies appropriating the intellectual property of college students, in the form of their uploaded coursework and online interactions, using data-collection instruments that include but are not limited to machine-scorers, LMSs, plagiarism-detection programs, MOOCs, and whatever else might be headed our way, and using data that rightly belongs to the students, not to Coursera or EdX or Udacity or whoever else comes along looking for a piece of this lucrative action, all of it collected without informed consent or compensation, however they choose and in ways that none of us really has the slightest idea about.

And I am talking about private companies collecting and using for their own interests, again without informed consent or compensation, data that belongs to instructors and that is the product of their expertise, experience, and labor. In its most obvious form, that data comes out of the instructor responses to those first 100 papers that they must grade in order to “train” the machine-scoring software to take over that job. But why wouldn’t all our online interactions with students be collected and analyzed in ways that benefit the companies who collect them, whether via MOOCs, LMSs, or any other proprietary platforms?

The whole thing is starting to remind me of how the good ol’ boys of Stepford had their wives read long lists of words into tape recorders so that the voices of the compliant robots with which the actual human women would soon be replaced would sound authentic. The robots looked just like the original humanoids, only with 100% less feminist consciousness and no backtalk.

Coursera, one of the major for-profit MOOC companies, announces on its website that they

envision a future where the top universities are educating not only thousands of students, but millions. Our technology enables the best professors to teach tens or hundreds of thousands of students.

Through this, we hope to give everyone access to the world-class education that has so far been available only to a select few.

If it weren’t for all that pesky interaction with students and engagement with their work, one professor could indeed teach “not only thousands of students, but millions.” At the very least, we could certainly generate a lot more student credit hours than we possibly can now. This is something our institutions seem to want.

Of course, there is a catch, and it is kind of a big one. According to a March 2012 report inInside Higher Ed by Ry Rivard, self-explanatorily titled “Coursera’s Contractual Elitism,” Coursera is “contractually obliged to turn away the vast majority of American universities” because it has committed to offer courses exclusively in partnership with 62 “elite” universities in the U.S. EdX, Rivard reports, is also known for its “exclusivity” and will work with only 12 elite institutions. “Scores of universities have sought to partner with Coursera or edX,” he notes. “Most, of course, have been denied.” He concludes that “Most liberal arts colleges, community colleges and regional public universities could never join — and many public research universities haven’t been asked either.”

In other words, if these trends continue in the implementation of “disruptive” educational technologies (so named by the kind of people whose kids’ educations are unlikely to be disrupted, because disruption is for commoners), and with the money and power they’ve got behind them, the odds are in their favor, there is pretty much no chance that it will ever be any of my colleagues at this very fine but perpetually underfunded non-flagship state university (including me) in front of those “tens or hundred of thousands of students at a time.”

Maybe computerized grading of student work will eventually be seen as deal-breakinglyproblematic, even in the world of for-profit educational content providers, in the ways itscritics have delineated and/or in other ways, and human interaction will eventually triumph as something that matters.

But whether that realization ever comes to pass or not will make little difference in the lives of most professors, regardless of their status today as tenured, tenure-track, or contingent, because when you’ve got rock-star professors from Harvard and Stanford and MIT whose brilliance will be beamed all over the world to “not only thousands of students, but millions” at a time, the best we chumps can hope for is to be the ones to do the do the engaging with and responding to the writing of all those thousands or millions of students, that is, if we haven’t by then interfaced ourselves into obsolescence via those LMSs and machine-scorers and whatever might be coming next, by donating our knowledge, skills, experience, and labor to corporate entities who are all too willing to take that from us without informed consent, without compensation, and without a word of acknowledgment or thanks.

I realize this is a horribly dystopic vision, and I hope to God I am completely wrong about all of it.

Update: Please, please make it stop.

I Woke Up This Morning in a “Right-to-Work” State

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It really happened. And in Michigan, of all places.

snyder_divider

On December 6, 2012, Republicans in the Michigan state legislature rammed through two so-called “right to work” (RTW) bills during a lame-duck session with the potential (and, arguably, the intent) to decimate organized labor in a state whose prosperity through the better part of the 20th century was built on unionism, a tradition that was hard fought and bravely won.

On December 11, 2012, GOP Governor Rick Snyder signed these bills into law.

Because the lame-duck GOP could not muster the two-thirds majority required for the acts to take effect immediately, there was a constitutionally mandated waiting period of 90 days from the end of the session at which the measure was enacted.

That 90 days is up today, March 28, 2013, a date that is sure to go down as one of the darkest for people in Michigan who have to work for a living, which is of course the overwhelming majority of us. It is also likely to have repercussions for working people nationwide.

I am writing this post as a citizen. I also happen to be the vice president of the faculty union at the university where I am employed as a professor of linguistics. In my capacity as VP of our chapter of the American Association of University Professors, I write a blog about labor issues of interest to my faculty colleagues, and at some point in the near future, I will write a post to address some of the issues I am getting into here.

But right now, I want to write simply in my capacity as a pissed-off citizen of a once-great state with a once-thriving middle class where upward mobility was for a long time during the last century a real possibility for regular people who weren’t born rich and who have to work for a living.

I say “rammed through,” because the GOP-controlled legislature bypassed the standard committee hearing process and was closed to public comment. Citizens were literally locked out of the Capitol while the bills were debated and voted on. “You’re doing this in lame duck because you know next session, you won’t have the votes,” objected Rep. Brandon Dillon (D-Grand Rapids). “This is an outrage.”

It was indeed, in all kinds of ways. Police, who along with firefighters are exempted from RTW initially claimed that the building was over capacity but later changed their story to claim that there were safety concerns over fears that the crowd would become “unruly.” Peaceful protestors – also known as citizens and taxpayers — were arrested and maced during demonstrations that drew thousands on December 6, the day the legislature took up the bills.

I thought it would seem obvious to any thinking person that when people living off the fat of the state payroll abuse their positions in ways that threaten people’s livelihoods and economic well-being, said people are likely to get pretty righteously pissed off.

As egregious and anti-democratic as this whole fiasco was, what is even worse is that the sponsors of the bills made sure to include an appropriations provision in order to make them referendum-proof and therefore repeal-proof. Lame-duck session. No public hearings. No chance for referendum.

According to the Lansing State Journal:

Republicans, who are ushering right to work through the Legislature during the lame-duck session, said the appropriation is nothing unusual.Democrats and union leaders say it’s a political tactic aimed at minimizing dissent on the controversial legislation.

Each of the right-to-work bills includes language to give the Michigan Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs $1 million for this fiscal year. According to the bills, the funding would be earmarked for administrative costs associated with implementing and enforcing right to work and educating the public about the labor law. (My emphasis.)

That’s right: A million dollars in each bill.  Two million dollars for “administrative costs associated with implementing and enforcing right to work and educating the public about the labor law.” That’s two million dollars of the taxpayers’ money to spend on promoting highly unpopular legislation signed into law by an increasingly unpopular governor. Two million dollars that won’t be going to improve Michigan’s badly deteriorating infrastructures, or to bolster education, or to createjobs. Apparently, Michigan can afford to spend $2 million on “right-to-work” propaganda on behalf of the deep pockets who bought and paid for these bills in the first place by buying themselves a state legislature. Of course they can afford to pay for the propaganda themselves. It’s not like they haven’t done it before. But why should they, when they can mooch off the rest of us?

Thousands of protestors returned to Lansing on December 11, the day the governor was expected to sign the bills into law. The crowd included a lot of faculty and staff from my university. We have long been a strong union campus with seven employee bargaining units in all, including local chapters of the American Association of University Professors, AFSCME, and two affiliates of the American Federation of Teachers representing part-time faculty and graduate teaching assistants. And alongside instructional staff were landscape workers, maintenance workers, technicians of all stripes, food-service workers, and custodial workers.

RTW_protest

We joined thousands of friends, colleagues, and neighbors. We marched alongside nurses, auto workers, K-12 teachers, electricians, construction workers. The UAW was there, and so were the Teamsters, the United Farm Workers, and the United Food and Commercial Workers, the Service Workers International, the Building and Trades Council, and many others. Thousands of us marched in Lansing on that frigid, windy December day. Thousands more phoned and emailed the governor to try to get him to listen to reason, to implore him not to sign the bills.

Like many others that day, I was taking pictures with my phone and posting updates to Facebook:

Cops in riot gear seem to want us out of here. This is our house!
2:29 p.m. on December 11, 2012.

Gov. hasn’t signed anything yet acc to Capitol staff. Call him now and tell him to veto the RTW bills!
3:01 p.m. on December 11, 2012.

Some time later, a friend posted this comment on my thread:

I don’t know where you were. They gassed and arrested a bunch of people outside the Romney building…totally unprovoked. I was right there.
4:52 p.m. on December 11, 2012.

And finally, I posted my last update of the day:

Damn him. He signed the bills. Damn him.
6:01 p.m. on December 11, 2012.

Gov. Snyder had previously said on numerous occasions that RTW “wasn’t a priority” because he felt (rightly) that it was “too divisive an issue in difficult economic times.” As recently as September 2012, he said that RTW “is not on my agenda.” When he pledged to sign the lame-duck bills, the Detroit Free Press called him out in a scathing and right-on-the-money editorial, under the headline “A Failure of Leadership: Snyder’s About-Face on Right-to-Work Betrays Voters”:

Two years ago, a newly elected Rick Snyder told the Free Press editorial board he was determined to be a new kind of governor — a pragmatist focused like a laser on initiatives that promised to raise standards of living for all Michiganders.And until last week, we believed him.

[...]

Watching Snyder explain his right-to-work reversal was disturbing on several levels.

His insistence that the legislation was designed to promote the interests of unionized workers and “bring Michiganders together” was grotesquely disingenuous; even as he spoke, security personnel were locking down the capital in anticipation of protests by angry unionists.

Snyder’s ostensible rationale for embracing right-to-work legislation — it was, he insisted, a matter of preserving workers’ freedom of association — was equally dishonest.

The real motive of Michigan’s right-to-work champions, as former GOP legislator Bill Ballenger ruefully observed, is “pure greed” — the determination to emasculate, once and for all, the Democratic Party’s most reliable source of financial and organizational support.

[...]

Snyder’s closest brush with candor came when he suggested that his endorsement of right-to-work was less than voluntary — a decision “that was on the table whether I wanted it to be on the table or not.”

But that is less an excuse than a confession that Michigan’s governor has abdicated his leadership responsibilities to Republican legislators bent on vengeance.

On MSNBC the evening of December 11, Sen. Gretchen Whitmer (D-Lansing) spoke for a lot of us in the Great Lakes state:

“It is absolutely repulsive,” said Whitmer, “that this governor is such a coward he had to announce it from behind locked doors, cut off debate, lock people out of the capitol, and now he`s signed it behind a wall of armed police officers. You know why he`s doing that? Because he knows the public disagrees on this one and he is dead wrong.”

That was then.

And now 90 days have passed, and RTW is now the law in Michigan.

A lot of my colleagues are asking what RTW is going to mean for us. Our current contract expires on September 6, 2014, and on that day, the board-appointed faculty at Western Michigan University will after 38 years no longer have an agency shop. The other unions on our campus will lose their agency-shop status as their contracts expire over the next three years.

I don’t have good answers to their questions yet. I don’t know that anyone does. Lawyers and labor experts have yet to figure out what all this is eventually going to mean for workers in Michigan and beyond. But the outlook isn’t good.

In the meantime, lawsuits have been filed and the fight goes on.

I am going to stop writing now, even though I still have not said what I came here to say, even though by now it was yesterday morning when I woke up in a “right-to-work” state.

I came here to write about RTW in the specific context of the destructive legislative manipulation, interference, and flat-out blackmail now being visited upon public universities in this state.

I came to write about the constitutional right of these universities to institutional autonomy, vested in our boards of trustees, and how the state constitution is being subverted by those who are sworn to uphold it.

I came to write about the pettiness and the hypocrisy and the thoughtless and mean-spirited actions of people whose abuses of power threaten the economic survival of the people of this state.

I came here to write about how 2014 starts now, and how we can’t let these bastards destroy everything that the people who came before us risked their lives for and what they won for all of us.

I came here to write about how we have to stand up to these control-freak bullies and how we must stand up alongside the brave people who are fighting hard to do what’s right.

I came here to write about how we need to get to work on doing everything we can to dismantle a corrupt system that has made it possible for ignorant, thoughtless assholes to run this magnificent state into the ground, all the while enjoying seats in the legislature that are safe until the sun goes supernova, in a state that is gerrymandered to within inches of its life, bankrolled by heartless assholes who don’t give a damn about anyone but themselves.

I will come back and say all of those things and a lot more very soon. But tonight I am just too sad.

Why I Will Vote YES on Prop 2

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Why I Am Voting YES on Michigan’s Proposal 2
(and How I Came to My Union Consciousness)

My worlds have been colliding in some interesting ways lately. Back in August of this year, I started writing this blog (which I began cross-posting at Daily Kos in September). I have always been interested in progressive issues and social justice, an orientation that very much informs how I make my way in the world and has led me to pursue the kind of career in which I believed (and still believe) it could be possible to make a real difference in people’s lives, preferably for the better.

My day job is professor of linguistics, and my particular interests are in language variation and the history of the English language. (I write a linguistics blog on these topics called Functional Shift, although I’ve been a bit slack about keeping it up since I started writing Alevei.) Because language can be such a powerful force for good but can also be wielded in ways that can cause great harm, my approaches to research and teaching assume that linguistic justice is social justice. I will write more on that topic in a forthcoming post, because it has been on my mind even more than usual lately, but for now, I will just say that I consider all teaching and academic scholarship to be political acts in themselves, which is to say that I am aware that this is the case and acknowledge it, even though many who are engaged in academic work do not acknowledge it, and a lot of them probably don’t even realize that it is or would not admit it that it is. Of course, we are not all working from the same political orientations or toward the same ends. There is actually far more intellectual diversity in the profession than the popular stereotype of the “typical” academic as politically liberal would suggest.

Anyway, this post isn’t really about the day-to-day work of professoring, although that is definitely relevant here in a couple of ways. I started this post by saying that my worlds have been colliding in recent weeks. The epicenter of that collision is my candidacy for the vice presidency of my faculty union in an election that is now underway and that thus coincides with the “real” election coming up this week. Here in Michigan, the “real” election will include several ballot initiatives, including Proposal 2, which would amend the state constitution to add language that guarantees the right to collective bargaining.

Over the course of thinking about the upcoming presidential election, my own campaign, and Prop 2, I have had occasion to think about how I came to my union consciousness. I wrote an essay on that topic for my campaign blog, and in the process of doing that, I realized that (1.) even most of the people to whom I am closest don’t know that story, although it is central to who I am today, and (2.) perhaps more important, it might be helpful in making a case in support of Prop 2. In the latter spirit, I thought I’d share it here, with a few revisions as appropriate for the different audiences.

I am a professor at Western Michigan University (WMU), an institution that is a collective-bargaining chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). I have written previously (here and here) about the business of higher education and the financial prospects of faculty at non-elite colleges and universities, so if you are familiar with my earlier posts on that topic, you are already aware that anything that most people would consider “wealth” is pretty much out of the question for most of us here among the WMU faculty. However, we are very fortunate indeed to enjoy a solid middle-class existence and the possibility of continuing upward mobility over the course of our careers here. This good fortune is largely thanks to our union affiliation.

However, with the recent shift in public sentiment in the U.S. toward public-sector workers and unions have come stagnating wages and serious questions as to whether it will be possible for workers in Michigan, including professors like me as well as everyone else who has to work for a living, to achieve or maintain a middle-class existence in the near future. This attitudinal shift was of course engineered by well-financed union-busting politicians and their corporate sponsors, and one result is that even in traditionally worker-friendly states like Michigan, so-called “right-to-work” laws are being taken up by state legislatures. In Michigan, both our state house and senate are Republican-controlled, and we have a Republican governor.

The text of Proposal 2 states that

“No existing or future law of the State or its political subdivisions shall abridge, impair or limit” the rights of public- and private-sector workers to bargain collectively.

At a time when collective bargaining rights are far from secure, even in Michigan of all places, a state whose long stretch of prosperity through most of the 20th century is thanks largely to a strong union culture, Proposal 2 is a pre-emptive strike against passage of a right-to-work law in Michigan and against the nationwide GOP attack on unions, a product of that party’s desire for the permanent majority of Karl Rove’s dreams and of their apparent outrage at the idea that working people might actually be able to prosper in this country again someday and that upward mobility might once again be possible even for people weren’t born rich.

When I joined the faculty at Western Michigan University in 2004, I was thrilled to have landed not only a tenure-track job that was about as close to a perfect fit for me as there could be but also that this job was at a strong union campus. The fellow who was chair of my department in those days, a local legend around these parts name of Arnie Johnston, handed me a copy of the 2002-05 WMU-AAUP Agreement as we got into his car to drive to the airport at the end of my campus visit. During the drive, Arnie offered me the position here and strongly encouraged me to read the Agreement carefully as I was considering my options. I had already been offered another position that I was considering seriously, and I had been up front with Arnie about that in our phone conversations preceding my visit. In the car that day, he emphasized the advantages of a union campus.

But I did not need any convincing on that topic. That WMU is a bargaining-unit chapter of the AAUP was an extremely attractive feature of the job and a key factor in my ultimately accepting Arnie’s offer to come here. To this day, there is absolutely no question in my mind that I made the right decision by choosing WMU. There is also no question but that Arnie was 100% correct when he said that there is no comparison between working as a member of a collective-bargaining unit and working on a non-union campus. But of course Arnie was right about pretty much everything union-related: In his 42 years at WMU, he served on the contract negotiation team four times (three times as chief negotiator) and even served on the team that negotiated the very first WMU-AAUP Agreement. In other words, he knew what he was talking about.

And what Arnie said to me on a snowy February day in 2004 as we drove to the airport is just as true today. As tough as things have gotten around here lately, those of us who have worked on non-union campuses or have friends and colleagues who don’t have bargaining units on their campuses know that the situation is far more dire at non-union institutions.

A lot of us know that first hand. I came to WMU after two years in a postdoctoral fellowship at a prestigious public university in Georgia. My experience there was fantastic in many ways, but in Georgia, public university faculties often go for years without any kind of raise, a situation common to all state employees. And that was back when the national economy was considerably stronger than it is now. This was especially true in sunbelt states like Georgia in the late 1990s and early 2000s, in part because many employers were (and still are) attracted by the inexpensive, nonunion workforce (Georgia has a so-called “right-to-work” law). And that workforce is skilled and well educated. (Since 1993, college tuition has been free in Georgia to in-state students who have maintained a B average or better in high school and continue to do so in college through the Hope Scholarship program.)

Before I went back to school in 1998 to begin my doctoral work, having finished my master’s degree in 1991, I spent several years working as a research consultant for environmental and civil rights law firms, and I also taught college-level writing and literature part time, first in the Washington, D.C., area and later at several institutions in Georgia and North Carolina. I grew up in south Florida, where organized labor is far from the norm and which has had a “right-to-work” clause in the state constitution since 1944. My parents were not union members, and neither were the parents of most if not all of my friends. So the years between the completion of my master’s degree and my return to school to pursue a Ph.D. were thus critical to my developing union consciousness, especially the two years I spent in North Carolina (1996-98).

During the years I spent working as an adjunct faculty member in North Carolina, a state whose hostility to public-sector collective bargaining is not only palpable in the daily experiences of many workers there but also codified in a 1959 law that directly prohibits public-sector employees from collective bargaining, I became so frustrated with the low pay, disrespectful treatment from employers, and poor working conditions for part-time faculty that I organized a movement to demand improved wages and working conditions on the two campuses where I taught, a community college and a branch of the state university system. I also published what I thought was going to be a one-time fact sheet for about 25 or 30 part-time colleagues, with information about things like how to get cheap dental cleanings (at the community college clinic) and basic medical care (at Planned Parenthood and a local Christian charitable organization that ran a clinic and whose help we qualified for because our income levels came in well below their threshold), but it quickly grew to a monthly newsletter with a circulation of over 600 part-time and full-time faculty at community colleges and universities throughout western North Carolina.

Not only were adjunct faculty members like me exploited ridiculously in North Carolina and elsewhere (and not much has changed for the better since that time), and not only was this also at the expense of the tenure-line hires the schools weren’t making as long as they had us part-timers to do so much of the work for next to nothing, but the tenured and tenure-track faculty at the campuses where I taught were also paid well below the national averages for jobs like theirs in peer institutions, a finding which held across academic disciplines and across all academic ranks. (Interestingly, salaries for administrators at the community college were in every case considerably higher than the national averages for their jobs.)

By “exploited ridiculously,” I mean that the community college where I taught had no qualms about assigning adjunct instructors, or “part-timers,” to teach as many as five courses per academic quarter, meaning that we were “part-timers” in name only. And at a rate of pay of $976 per class per quarter, people who were trying to make a living by adjuncting (like me) had no choice but to accept all the assignments they were offered. One memorable quarter, I taught seven classes: five at the community college, with three different course preps, and two at the university (at $1620 per class). By “memorable” I mean that I was so buried the entire time that I actually remember almost nothing from that period of my life, during which I also waited tables at a local restaurant. My gross earnings that year (1997) were just over $17,000. One thing I do remember is that it was during that seven-course quarter that my grandpa died, and I returned to work after his funeral to an invoice in my campus mailbox at the community college. I was personally responsible for paying the substitute instructors who had met my classes while I was gone.

Not surprisingly, my advocacy got me into some trouble with the administrations at both institutions where I taught, and especially at the community college. The occasion that stands out the most for me was when I published a chart of administrator salaries in my newsletter. Of course this was all public information, so I thought I was actually being tactful when I decided not actually to name the individuals in print. I just listed the administrative titles. I didn’t even identify the institutions; I just labeled the data charts “representative university in North Carolina” and “representative community college,” which I thought made sense because the newsletter went to six or seven other schools besides the two where I taught.

A few days after that edition of the newsletter was published, I arrived at a campus-wide faculty meeting at the community college, having driven straight over after my shift serving lunch at the restaurant where I also worked, just in time to be harangued in front of the entire faculty by the college president, who took exception to my publication of his salary (and in the process outed himself as the “representative community college president” on my chart). I stood there trying to smile politely as a guy who was paid more than ten times what I earned working three jobs thundered at me from the stage. I still had on my waitress uniform. I don’t think the irony was lost on anyone there, except maybe the president. He did not seem aware of anything beyond his own righteous indignation.

As difficult and demoralizing as those two years in North Carolina were, they were also highly instructive. My experience of having to work three jobs in return for near-poverty wages and no benefits, as well as the experience of researching for my newsletter and connecting with other activists at that time who generously shared their knowledge and experience with me, helped to cement my conviction that workers in all sectors have little to no hope for upward mobility without the ability to organize. We simply can’t count on our employers to do right by us out of the goodness of their hearts.

Fast-forward to spring 2007, my third year at WMU, when I joined the WMU-AAUP Association Council as one of our three department representatives. From the beginning, I loved the work and the collegiality that came with being a member of the AC, and I found our meetings to be highly educational not only about labor issues but also about campus issues more generally. And after nearly six years of this work, I am running now for the position of chapter vice president because I still believe strongly that the best hope for protecting and improving the quality of life for faculty at WMU is a strong, robust, and active union. There have been some problems with the chapter leadership in recent years, with the unfortunate consequence that a lot of my colleagues are feeling alienated from their own union. I completely understand and actually share their frustration. It would definitely be easier to walk away, as so many of my colleagues have already done or have been tempted to do.

But a situation in which the faculty feels frustrated by the way things have been going and feels alienated from its union isn’t good for any of us. We have to do something about that. The faculty is the union. Period. Every single bargaining-unit member has an enormous stake in the direction of the chapter and therefore has the right as well as compelling reasons to participate in determining that direction.

I also believe that our best possible defense against the ill political winds that are blowing off-campus is a strong and united faculty on-campus. That means a faculty who is engaged, ready to get involved, and prepared to mobilize when the time comes. And that time is coming. Actually, it is already here.

And those ill political winds aren’t just about a bunch of professors, and so neither is Prop 2. It’s about everyone who has to work for a living. That is why Prop 2 has been endorsed by hundreds of Michigan businesses, religious leaders, and lawmakers.

So if you live in Michigan, please vote YES on Proposal 2 next Tuesday, and please do everything you can to impress upon your friends and family and everyone else you know who is registered to vote in Michigan to do the same. Michigan prospered when we had a strong union culture. The union workers who came before us built this state and led us to prosperity. We have no chance of getting that standard of living back and restoring a real possibility of upward mobility for working people in Michigan if we do not stand together. That is how unions work. That is why they work. We need to do everything we can to try to restore that culture and go from there. Passing Prop 2 is a good start, so please vote YES!

Why I Will Vote NO on Michigan’s Proposal 5

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How I Am Voting on Michigan’s Six Statewide Ballot Initiatives, Part 2:
Why I Am Voting NO on Proposal 5

On Tuesday, November 6, I will vote NO on Proposal 5, “A Proposal to Amend the State Constitution to Limit the Enactment of New Taxes by State Government.”

I am voting NO because I don’t think the rich asshole who is bankrolling this proposal should get to call the shots for the entire state and subvert the process by which an elected legislature does the job of representing the citizens.

If this sounds a lot like why I am voting NO on Prop 6, as I discussed in my previous post, it’s because — wouldn’t you know it? — it’s the same rich asshole behind both proposals.

The text of Prop 5 as it will appear on the ballot on Tuesday reads as follows:

This proposal would:

Require a 2/3 majority vote of the State House and the State Senate, or a statewide vote of the people at a November election, in order for the State of Michigan to impose new or additional taxes on taxpayers or expand the base of taxation or increasing the rate of taxation.

This section shall in no way be construed to limit or modify tax limitations otherwise created in this Constitution.

Proposal 5 is a recipe for fiscal disaster. It’s a Tea Party scheme to establish minority rule over anything having to do with taxation in Michigan, and it is bankrolled by the rich asshole who is also behind the almost equally stupid and dangerous Prop 6. Prop 5 is opposed by everyone from the United Auto Workers, the Sierra Club of Michigan, and the League of Women Voters to Republican governor Rick Snyder and the Michigan Chamber of Commerce.

Supporters of Prop 5 seem to be limited to the rich asshole and his family, Grover Norquist, and a group known as the Michigan Alliance for Prosperity that buys into Tea Party ideologies about taxation and is heavily financed by the rich asshole through the Liberty Bell Agency, which is run by the rich asshole’s son. Also on board with Prop 5 are the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity and the freaky fringe Chamber-of-Commerce-wannabe that is the National Federation of Independent Business, which doesn’t even have the sense to be embarrassed by the dishonesty that is evident in its own acronym: NFIB.

And there’s a good reason that everyone with at least half a brain is opposed to Prop 5: If any future tax increase, no matter how slight, has to be approved by a 2/3 majority in both houses, then there is virtually no way any future tax increase could ever pass. Roger Martin, spokesman for the NO-on-5 organization Defend Michigan Democracy, writes that

No tax reform proposal (cut, new tax, closing a loophole or ending a tax break) has ever passed the state Legislature with a supermajority vote. It just does not happen. So, this is not [just] about making it harder to raise taxes….It’s about making state government impossible.

If Prop 5 passes, it would take the yea votes of 25 state senators (out of a total of 38) to pass any proposed increase, which is also to say that it would only take 13 senators to block it. In the House, 73 representatives (out of a total of 110) would have to vote yea under Prop 5 rules, while it would take only 37 representatives to block the legislation.

Prop 5 is thus the love child of a rich, selfish asshole and a virulently anti-tax, anti-government strain of Republicanism that is unfortunately becoming increasingly mainstream, as evidenced by the long, depressing list of dittohead hypocrites who have somehow gotten themselves elected to public office (and who apparently see no irony in living off the generosity of us taxpayers by collecting paychecks and enjoying generous benefits that are funded by the taxes they profess to abhor) and who have sold their souls (and sold out their constituents) by signing Grover Norquist’s so-called Taxpayer Protection Pledge.

The Republican party has spent the last two-plus decades trying to brand itself as the “down with taxes!” party, no matter the cost to the economy or to our most vulnerable citizens. That ideology has become a central tenet of even mainstream Republicanism now, as evidenced by the selection of zombie-eyed granny-starver Paul Ryan as the party’s VP nominee. And now they want to be able to force it on the citizens of this state whether they have a mandate from the people (i.e. a majority in the legislature) or not. Our answer to this has to be a resounding NO.

In other words, Prop 5 would guarantee that the Tea Party gets its way with respect to taxes in Michigan whether it is in power or not. That is of course incredibly undemocratic, but it is also a matter of serious concern for anyone who gives a damn about the social safety net or can imagine a time when emergency measures might have to be taken (such as in the aftermath of a natural disaster) to find a way to raise revenue in a hurry. Further, its passage could jeopardize Michigan’s bond rating, according to the Ann Arbor News, “as lenders [become] wary of our ability to maintain revenue.” The News adds that, should Prop 5 pass, citizens of Michigan can also expect to see increases in the fees we will pay for state-provided services, from license plates to university tuition, and that municipalities would have to take drastic measures to try to blunt the impact of sharp reductions state support, which would be likely to include reducing or eliminating local services and increasing property taxes.

The reality is that sometimes taxes need to be increased or new ones imposed. Times change. Infrastructure ages. So does the human population of the state. And especially in times of prosperity, toward which I hope (and believe) we are now beginning to return, I think it is perfectly appropriate to expect those of us who can afford it to kick in a little more, to support the changing needs of our state and to think about protecting our citizens in the future when things may not be going so well economically. I for one happen to like roads and schools and libraries and first-responders and environmental protection of our natural resources.

But if Prop 5 passes, it would be very, very difficult for the state to find ways to manage its changing – and yes, sometimes increasing – needs for revenue because it would be almost impossible to get a 2/3 majority. As the Ann Arbor News reports,

No one on either side can recall a tax that passed by two-thirds of each chamber. It does not happen.

If Prop 5 passes, that means no tax increase would ever be approved by the legislature nor would any new tax ever be imposed, except perhaps in the most extraordinary of circumstances, and maybe not even then. I am thinking specifically, of course, about that time back in the spring of 2011, when Republicans in the U.S. congress, including VP candidate Ryan, argued that funding for disaster relief be offset by cuts to other programs. As usual in their zero-sum world, they played politics rather than focusing their full attention on the people of Joplin, Missouri, and others who had suffered extraordinary losses in a series of violent storms. Rep. Ryan and his GOP running mate, Mitt Romney, have since both come out in favor of shifting primary responsibility for disaster relief to the states. This would be an especially catastrophic shift for states whose legislatures are hamstrung by idiotic constraints like Prop 5 and by damn-fool legislators who signed Norquist’s no-new-taxes pledge. (And it is of course one more strong argument in favor of re-electing President Obama.)

In sum, Prop 5 is short-sighted, greed-driven, anti-democratic Tea Party bullshit. For the love of everything, please vote NO.

Why I Am Voting NO on Michigan’s Proposal 6

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How I Am Voting on Michigan’s Ballot Initiatives, Part 1:
Why I am voting NO on Proposal 6

Next Tuesday, November 6, I will vote NO on Proposal 6, “A Proposal to Amend the State Constitution Regarding Construction of International Bridges and Tunnels” (full text here). I am voting NO because I don’t think some rich asshole who owns the only bridge between Detroit and Windsor, Ontario, should be protected by an amendment to the state constitution from the competition that a new bridge, the New International Trade Crossing (NITC), which will go up two miles south of the rich asshole’s bridge, would present.

According to the language of the measure, passage of Prop 6 would make it so that consideration of any “new international bridges or tunnels for motor vehicles” would have to go to a statewide referendum before any state funding could be allocated ”for acquiring land, designing, soliciting bids for, constructing, financing, or promoting new international bridges or tunnels.”

Such a referendum process would be financially burdensome on the state, of course. And the plan is also cynically manipulative of the anti-tax attitudes of many citizens in a state that was hit particularly hard by the Great Recession, an attitude the rich asshole is counting on, judging by his efforts to get Prop 6 onto the ballot in Michigan in the first place and now to try to get it passed. He has gone to astonishing personal expense in his campaign for Prop 6, which suggests that he is likely to invest similarly significant resources to try to defeat any such referendum, should Prop 6 actually pass. According to the Detroit Free Press, his Yes-on-6 campaign has outspent the No-on-6 side by nearly 40 to 1.

But Prop 6 is also problematic because of the way it seeks to subvert the process by which an elected legislature represents the citizens and does the work of deciding how state revenues should be spent. That is their job. That is how it works.

Let’s be clear about this: Proposal 6 is written for absolutely no other reason than to protect that rich asshole’s monopoly. The NITC, for which an agreement has already been reached between the United States and Canada, has statewide bipartisan support. Michigan’s Republican governor, Rick Snyder, strongly favors it, as do former Michigan governors Jennifer Granholm (D) and John Engler (R), along with a number of similarly strange bedfellows, like the Michigan State AFL-CIO and the Michigan Chamber of Commerce. (You can see a list of prominent supporters of the bridge project here. By contrast, check out who’s all for Prop 6.) Even Detroit’s leading newspapers, the liberal Free Press and the conservative News, which rarely find common ground, have both come out in support of NITC and in their opposition to Prop 6.

But the NITC would take toll revenue away from the rich asshole and end his monopoly, which is why he has dropped something like $33M so far to get Prop 6 on the ballot and to blast Michigan voters with misinformation in order to try to get it passed. His campaign has relied heavily on false claims (debunked here and here). One particularly egregious claim that his campaign keeps hammering is that NITC will cost Michigan taxpayers $100M per year, when in fact the entire tab is being picked up by the Canadian government.

The upside of NITC for Michigan taxpayers, apart from getting a fantastic new international bridge that will cost us next to nothing, includes 10,000-15,000 jobs for workers here in Michigan and on the Canadian side. Improving delivery efficiency between the two countries, which is critical for the U.S. auto industry (and therefore to Michigan workers) as well as for other industries, would be another significant economic benefit for the state. The NITC project would also result in an influx of more than $2 billion for Michigan in federal matching funds for which the state would be eligible even though Canada is putting up Michigan’s share of the construction costs.

In other words, NITC is a winning proposition for everyone except one rich asshole.

In sum, Prop 6 is a ridiculous outrage. There is no other way to say this. A rich asshole with more money than sense, no concept whatsoever of a greater good, and a complete lack of acquaintance with the truth simply should not be able to buy himself a constitutional amendment in order to guarantee himself the right to a monopoly for the foreseeable future on the revenue generated from everyone who travels between Detroit and Windsor (and every single thing that is delivered from one city to the other), and to hell with the costs to everyone else.

Vote NO on 6 not only to send this selfish jackass a resounding message that his astonishing greed will not be countenanced by the people of this state but also to support the opportunity to get a state-of-the-art new international crossing that will cost us practically nothing and that will be a great help toward getting Michigan back on its feet

60 Minutes FAIL: 10 Questions Scott Pelley Didn’t Ask Mitt Romney But Should Have

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On last night’s broadcast of 60 Minutes, in place of the hard-hitting interview that viewers might have expected for a presidential candidate (something more along the lines of, say, Steve Kroft’s righteous pummeling of President Obama, which aired later in the broadcast), audiences were instead treated to a nothing-to-see-here talking-point-a-thon in which Scott Pelley not only allowed Mitt Romney to weasel out of every one of the (very few) hard questions he actually asked but also missed numerous opportunities to try to get the candidate to talk about some of the most serious (and legitimate) voter concerns regarding this campaign.

Here, then, is my list of

10 Questions Scott Pelley Didn’t Ask Mitt Romney But Should Have:

1. Gov. Romney, you say that

the President’s decision not to meet with Bibi Netanyahu, prime minister of Israel, when the prime minister is here for the United Nations session, I think, is a mistake and it sends a message throughout the — the Middle East that somehow we distance ourselves from our friends and I think the exact opposite approach is what’s necessary.

Let’s talk about the Mideast policy you unveiled at that Florida fundraiser last May, which became public thanks to Mother Jones and the “47%” video. That policy, as you articulated it in the video, seems to be based on your belief that the Palestinians have “no interest whatsoever in establishing peace and that the pathway to peace is almost unthinkable to accomplish.” Here is what you proposed:

So what you do is, you say, you move things along the best way you can. You hope for some degree of stability, but you recognize that this is going to remain an unsolved problem. We live with that in China and Taiwan. All right, we have a potentially volatile situation, but we sort of live with it, and we kick the ball down the field and hope that ultimately, somehow, something will happen and resolve it.

What kind of message do you think your characterization of the Palestinians might send, especially in the context of the comments you made in Jerusalem last July, suggesting that their culture is inferior, comments that many Palestinians and others found offensive, and what message do you think your plan — essentially to do nothing to try to work for peace in the region — might send throughout the Middle East?

2. Gov. Romney, many Americans are concerned about your response to the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, on the anniversary of 9/11, which took the lives of Ambassador Chris Stevens, along with members of his staff and security detail. Even some prominent members of your own party have suggested that your reaction was an ill-advised rush to judgment about a volatile international situation about which you did not have all the facts. How would you reassure voters who think your response raises questions about your ability to serve as commander-in-chief?

3. What would you say to voters who perceive your response to the attack on Ambassador Stevens and his staff in Benghazi, namely that you expressed no apparent grief or regret about the tragic loss of life of individuals in service to our country even when you had the opportunity to clarify your remarks the next day, once you did have all the information, as exploiting a national tragedy as a way to try to earn political points?

4. Are you aware that most of the 47% of Americans you identified in the Mother Jones video as paying no taxes, the ones you said you could never get to “take personal responsibility and care for their lives,” are working people who are not exempt from payroll taxes, and that therefore many of them are actually taxed at a higher rate than you are?

5. Since the very small minority of Americans who pay “no income tax” are families living in poverty, low-income seniors who have paid all their lives into the system that now supports them, and active duty soldiers deployed to combat zones, would you like to take an opportunity now to reconsider your description of these Americans as people

who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it.

6-9. Suggested follow-ups to this exchange:

PELLEY: The tax rate for everyone in your plan would go down.

ROMNEY: That’s right.

PELLEY: But because you’re going to limit exemptions and deductions, everybody’s going to essentially be paying the same taxes.

ROMNEY: That’s right. Middle-income people will probably see a little break, because there’ll be no tax on their savings.

6. Are you saying that you’re going to cut capital gains taxes on middle-income people? Do you understand that most middle-income people do not have any capital gains?

7. Are you aware that most middle-income families are not able to amass enough in savings for the interest on it to amount to anything and that therefore a tax cut on that interest would mean nothing to most middle-income people?

8. When you say that “middle-income people” are likely “to see a little break,” are you still talking about those earning $200,000-250,000, as you defined “middle income” last week?

9. You seem to be saying that the effect of your tax reform would be net neutral. If that is true, what exactly is the point of it?

10. Why won’t you release your damn tax returns?

University of I’ve-Got-Mine

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In a recent post, I set out to discuss a proposal by the University of Chicago economist Luigi Zingales that advocated equity financing of higher education, which he outlined in a June 2012 New York Times op-ed, but reconsidered that project when I realized that Zingales’s political connections, including his close association with GOP vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan, made for a more interesting story, especially in light of the author’s coyness with respect to his political motivations, about which the Times article and accompanying author bio are silent. In making his pitch for equity funding of higher education, he presents himself strictly as a professor and an economist, situating his authority and credibility on the topic entirely in that context. He is of course a professor of economics, but there is no question that his position is also very much informed by his political affiliations, which he does not disclose. As my own position is also political, I have no objection to hearing out the positions of others who come to their beliefs by way of their politics, including when theirs are different from mine. But I think it is important to be forthright about political orientation and values if we intend a healthy debate, and Zingales was not at all forthright in those respects in his presentation to readers.

In this post, I revisit the op-ed, but not because I think his idea deserves to be taken seriously. It doesn’t. Zingales has established precisely zero credibility for one of his central claims, in which he attributes the decreasing affordability of higher education to “crony capitalism,” which he further claims enriches professors at the expense of “everyone else.” As I discussed previously, his unwillingness or inability to acknowledge that the overwhelming majority of professors in the U.S. are not pulling down anywhere near as much bank as he is seems disingenuous. As I also observed, his credibility is further challenged by an impressive tolerance for cognitive dissonance that enables him to give bestie Paul Ryan and his family a pass despite their extensive record of self-enrichment via federal generosity, which I guess is somehow not “crony capitalism” but rather just good old-fashioned free-market capitalism the way God intended.

Rather, I have reconsidered because that op-ed was read and taken seriously by a lot of people, meaning that it has become part of the mainstream of public discourse on the very real problem of college affordability for American students, and especially because it is a fine example of what is so incredibly wrong with the assumptions that inform a lot of that discourse.

Zingales proposes that “Investors could finance students’ education with equity rather than debt. In exchange for their capital, the investors would receive a fraction of a student’s future income — or, even better, a fraction of the increase in her income that derives from college attendance.” According to the author, “Equity contracts would diversify the risk of failure, with highly compensated superstars helping to finance the educations of less successful college graduates,” although it is not at all clear how that would work.

He further claims that the contracts will somehow “avoid pushing graduates into lucrative jobs just to pay off debt,” which sounds great in theory, but I don’t think it could possibly be true in practice. I don’t see how such an arrangement wouldn’t push graduates toward “lucrative jobs,” including by initially pushing them towards undergraduate majors that are considered more likely to lead to such jobs. I doubt Dr. Zingales is naive enough to believe otherwise, and since he provides no evidence to support his claim, I suspect that he is being disingenuous, especially when he adds this part:

Most important, these contracts would provide financiers with an incentive to counsel students wisely, as financiers would profit from good educational investments and lose from bad ones. This would create more informed demand for the schools, exerting pressure on them to contain costs and improve quality.

Leaving aside for now the suggestion that improved quality is somehow a logical result to expect from budget cuts, I am wondering what “good educational investments” that would result in “profit” for the “financiers” might look like. The specifics are left to our collective imagination. But the focus of media attention to the topic suggests that the operative definition of a good educational investment is one that maximizes future earnings in relation to tuition investment, on the assumption that a good investment is definable in exclusively economic – and exclusively individual – terms.

One influential study of “return on investment” (ROI) conducted by PayScale (a company that collects and analyzes salary and other career-related data) ranked 853 U.S. colleges and universities according to the extent to which “what you pay to attend” is worth “what you get back in lifetime earnings.” You probably won’t be surprised to find that of the top 20 schools with the highest ROIs, all but two are private, six are Ivies, and the total tuition at all but three tops $200K. Apparently even that astronomical tuition investment is totally worth it because of the “projected net return on investment” over 30 years: $800K for the #20 college on the list (Rensselaer Polytechnic) and over $1M for the institutions ranked 1-9.

Thankfully, as of course we all know, the playing field for admission even to elite universities is completely level, and so there is no object whatsoever for any student who would like to attend a high-ROI institution. (Alevei!) [1]

There is also the role of undergraduate major in calculating ROI. U.S. News recommends “College Majors with the Best Return on Investment,” and Fortune reveals “The 15 College Majors with the Biggest Payoffs.” Kiplinger offers a helpful list of the “Worst College Majors for Your Career” and Time outlines the “20 Best- and Worst-Paid College Majors.” The “best ROI” majors include (pre-)medicine, engineering (looks like any kind will do), economics, finance, or anything that leads to a career in the pharmaceutical industry. Selecting one of these financially promising majors, according one expert, will “justify going to a more expensive school” because “there’s more job opportunities” and these jobs “pay better.”

So, is majoring in philosophy (Kiplinger‘s 4th “worst major”) at Stanford (4th highest institutional ROI) a good educational investment or a bad one? Can a high-ROI school compensate for a low-ROI major, or vice versa? Is it still a good investment to pursue a high-ROI major, like electrical engineering (5th “best major”), even if it’s at a low-ROI institution?

And which is the better investment: $200K in tuition for an anthropology major (#1 “worst major”) at a high-ROI institution or at a lower-ROI university at half or even a third of the cost? Will equity financiers want to invest in anthropology majors at all? Might their “wise counsel” include discouraging students from pursuing low-ROI majors? Should anthropology and all other low-ROI majors then be reserved exclusively for those students who can pay their own way?

Will financiers support students who want to attend higher-cost high-ROI institutions if they pursue low-ROI majors? Will they support students at low-ROI colleges at all? Is a low-ROI major and/or attendance at a low-ROI institution a bad investment? Is it a better investment not to go to school at all?

Zingales doesn’t address these issues, not a surprise since he never even gets around to defining “good educational investments” beyond announcing that “financiers would profit” from them and “lose from bad ones.” But it does seem like a free-market guy like him would be totally down with the ROI-rankings game. By the way, his own institution offers “far above median” faculty salaries and enjoys considerable renown, despite its less-than-stellar institutional ROI ranking (#78).

And while Zingales offers no evidence for his claim that somehow equity financing will “avoid pushing graduates into lucrative jobs just to pay off debt,” the framing of his proposal in relation to the investor’s incentive for profit suggests that in the system he envisions, the “wise counsel” of the “financiers who would profit from good educational investments” may well steer students toward high-ROI majors if not compel high-ROI major selection as a condition of funding.

I would love for this to be nothing more than some slippery-slope paranoia on my part, but I don’t think it is. For one thing, there is just no evidence that Zingales’s formulation assumes any kind of educational or cultural value beyond the individual ROI model for the student and “profit” for the “financier.” For another, the ubiquity of ROI as the central assumption of recent public discourse on the topic of the value of higher education suggests that it is not. And for yet another, programs that tie eligibility to very specific kinds of “educational investments” are already part of the discussion. For example, the Amazon Career Choice Program for warehouse employees of the behemoth online bookseller (and everything-else seller) is, according to its FAQ page, “unlike traditional tuition reimbursement programs” in that they “exclusively fund education only in areas that are well-paying and in high demand.” (Those are my italics, but it was not my idea to use “exclusively” and “only” redundantly. Thanks to my low-ROI undergraduate major, today I can easily recognize such graceless syntactic constructions, and the satisfaction I take in doing so is what they pay me with instead of money.)

But none of this quite gets at the real problems with the discourse in general and the Zingales proposal in particular, one of which is this: There is no cultural consensus that students will make the best educational decisions when they base those decisions primarily (if not solely) on the basis of expected individual financial ROI. Should we accept that assumption as a logical guiding principle for any serious discussion of higher education? The case has not been made convincingly or really at all that this kind of thinking is the wisest course for our society, and I have a pretty strong suspicion that it is not. [2]

And speaking of unconvincing arguments, Zingales insists that despite how all this looks, what he is advocating “is not a modern form of indentured servitude.” In his pre-emptive defense against the charge, which he is right to anticipate, he reveals another problematic ideological stance that has gone mostly (but not entirely) unchallenged in the wider public debate of whether college is “worth it.” Zingales says that what he is proposing is not indentured servitude but rather

a voluntary form of taxation, one that would make only the beneficiaries of a college education — not all taxpayers — pay for the costs of it.

I could not agree more that the beneficiaries of a college education should absolutely be paying for it. Where Zingales and I disagree is in our respective understandings of who the beneficiaries really are.

The problem is not that we have a system in which those who are not “the beneficiaries” of higher education are somehow the ones paying for it. The problem is that too many of the beneficiaries are not paying anywhere near enough for it, too many of them resent what little they do pay, and too many of them would like to pay even less.

This is at least in part because a lot of people honestly don’t see themselves as beneficiaries of the education of other people, which I have to agree is a logical conclusion in the context of the dominant ideology that informs popular opinion on the topic of higher ed, which is (say it with me) that it is all about individual financial ROI. In that context, why would people see themselves as beneficiaries of any education but their own?

But they are. We all are. That a whole lot more people benefit from the education of a single individual than merely the individual and that these benefits are cumulative and span generations is indisputable. We are incredibly fortunate to live in a mostly safe, mostly civilized, and relatively prosperous society with extraordinary rights and resources that are foundational for anyone who wants to build anything. That Americans have achieved so much that is truly extraordinary – think moon-landing extraordinary, Internet extraordinary – is a direct result of the high cultural value that we the people have placed on education in general and higher education in particular, in which we have invested accordingly. In this sense, and I want to make clear that I think this is the sense that matters most, higher education is not merely or even primarily an investment in an individual.

But somehow the idea that it is has become a powerful cultural assumption. Yes, the individual benefit of a college education is undeniable, but it makes no sense to assume (or to try to dictate) that it is valuable only in terms of the financial return to the individual (and to the “financier” who pays for it). What an incredibly cynical, short-sighted, and unimaginative view that is.

Imagine what our society might look like if Americans had always thought that way. Imagine a United States with no G.I. bill, no Claiborne Pell, no cultural tradition of education as a public good. How many valuable advances and innovations in the sciences, technology, medicine, and yes, the arts and the humanities, would never have happened if only affluent people could access a quality university education, if the only higher education open to most Americans was training to be good little worker bees in jobs that are some billionaire’s idea of what is best for us?

The debt that a student takes on is all too individual, but the benefit of that individual’s education is collective. And until we can find a better way to make higher education more affordable and more accessible, we ought to be working harder to support individuals for whom student loans are the only option, even the ones who don’t opt for high-ROI majors and those for whom high-ROI institutions are out of reach. Students who choose alternatives to financial self-enrichment, who choose to pursue work in areas that make life worth living not only for themselves but also for others — and that includes pre-school teachers, artists, anthropologists, and philosophers, as well as doctors and engineers — are good educational investments even if “financiers” don’t ever recoup a dime of “profit” off them.

I guess it’s easy to blame the student debt crisis on college students and graduates and professors and administrators, or to propose a funding scheme like Zingales’s that does nothing to address the real causes of increasing college unaffordability, starting with the national disgrace that is the systematic public divestment from state universities. I guess that’s easier than taking on the devastating consequences of student-loan debt on individuals and on the U.S. economy in any meaningful way.

It is hard not to be discouraged at the moment, especially given the possibility that the nation might elect a smirking, dishonest presidential candidate whose idea of fiscal responsibility is disparaging poor people and stashing millions in overseas accounts to avoid paying his taxes. And never mind his equally dishonest, free-marketeer, I-built-that running mate, whose own accumulation of wealth via government subsidies entitles him to a description so many times stronger than hypocrite that even this low-ROI English major can’t think of one that rises to the occasion.

But I hope that the cynical ideology that an educational investment is (and ought to be) an individual thing, that the point of education is an exclusively individual benefit, that the benefit can only be measured as a return on investment that can be counted only in dollars, and that any notion of a “greater good” is socialism and therefore bad does not discourage and even prevent people from pursuing educational goals that aren’t an obvious fast track to generating big revenue for themselves (and “profit” for their “financiers”). The last thing we need in this country is to continue to celebrate and reward the ideology of greed that has gotten us into so many of the messes that we are collectively in today. If we allow that ideology to continue to define our education policy, it is not going to be a win for most of us.

Notes:

[1] Of course it is not at all clear that factors that have nothing to do with quality of education, such as the socioeconomic privilege and social advantages that many high-institutional-ROI students and alumni enjoy, can be ruled out as significant influences on a high-ranking institution’s ROI. That is, such a return may not be a function of the institution itself but rather reflective of the relative privilege of the students most likely to be admitted. On a related note, see Thomas Edsall’s March 2012 New York Times article “The Reproduction of Privilege,” which  identifies “anti-democratic trends” in the admissions policies of the “most competitive” colleges, many of which are of course also high-ROI institutions.

[2] And don’t even get me started on how all this institutional ROI business does absolutely nothing to address the highly problematic role of elite colleges and universities in perpetuating social inequality. In discussions of ROI, that function goes completely unremarked even though it a key feature of what makes a high-ROI institution such a “good educational investment” in the first place. These institutions actually exacerbate the class divide, as Thomas Edsall observes in “The Reproduction of Privilege,” cited in Note 1 and linked again here.

Confessions of a Job-Creator

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I am a public-sector employee, a professor at a state university, a member of a labor union. The work I do has been described by a presidential candidate as “indoctrination.” I subscribe to the New York Times, I’m a member of the ACLU, I support my NPR member station, and I drive a foreign car. I supported President Obama’s campaign in 2008 after voting proudly for Hillary Clinton in the primary, and I am supporting him again this year.

In other words, some people think I represent a lot of what is wrong with this country.

But here is something they don’t know about me:

I am a job creator.

Some people think they know some things about us job creators. The guy whose job it is supposed to be to represent me in the U.S. House of Representatives, Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI), who has of course been featured before on these pages, thinks he knows some things about us job creators. He sent me an email the other day, like he likes to do sometimes, to make sure I didn’t miss his latest op-ed, which ran August 30 in his favorite small-town, low-circulation weekly, which apparently lets him publish whatever disingenuous propaganda he thinks his corporate overlords might want to read. The title of his latest is “Survey Highlights Top Concerns of U.S. Job Creators,” and you can read it in its entirety here.

For openers, Rep. Upton observes that “small business owners continue to lead the way for our economic recovery here in Michigan and throughout the United States.” He adds that “They not only embody the entrepreneurial spirit of our free market economy, but play a vitally important role when it comes to job creation, innovation, and local growth.”

It’s true. The stopped clock is right this time. Not to worry, though. It doesn’t last. The rest of the column is more of the usual BS we have come to expect from Rep. Upton, God love him. His response to concerns about energy costs cited by the “job creators” in the survey is to go on about some ditch-digging jobs that he says will save the U.S. economy. He addresses concerns about healthcare costs by announcing that the Affordable Care Act (ACA) hurts small businesses because it “does nothing to actually address the cost side of the equation.”

You’d think a member of Congress who spends so much time obsessing about health care in general and the ACA in particular would be aware of factual information about legislation that passed his chamber while he was in office, such as that the ACA contains no requirement that actual small businesses (as in the kind with 50 or fewer employees) provide insurance for their employees, that it includes no penalty for those who decline to do so, and that it actually offers incentives in the form of tax credits for small businesses who opt (yes opt, as in do something voluntarily) to provide coverage for their employees. You’d think Rep. Upton would know about that. [1]

And you are probably as surprised as I am to learn that the generous flow of profits to the job-creating healthcare industry, i.e. the “cost side of the equation,” which as Rep. Upton rightly notes, the ACA unfortunately does little to correct, is somehow not something that he can get behind. As Richard S. Levick put it in an article in Fast Company in July, ”5 Ways Insurers Can Position Themselves To Win Under The ACA“:

It’s not every day that an industry has as many as 46 million new customers delivered to its doorstep. But when the U.S. Supreme Court voted 5-4 to uphold the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and the controversial individual mandate last week, that’s precisely what happened for health insurance companies across the country.

Somehow this is not good enough for Rep. Upton, whose congressional career functions effectively as a wholly owned subsidiary of the industry?

OK, I exaggerate. “Wholly owned” probably isn’t fair. I mean, it isn’t fair to the oil and gas, electric utilities, and mining industries who are also major stakeholders in the Upton enterprise.

But we were talking about job creators, weren’t we? All right. Here’s my story:

In 2007, I invested $23,000 in a small-business start-up. That was all the money I had in the world. It was actually more than all the money I had in the world, because $15,000 of it was a cash advance I took out on my Visa card, which because it was 2007 I could do at a rate of 3.9%. The business was an automotive repair shop that Mr. Alevei was starting. He would run the business and fix the cars. I would keep my day job, help with the books, and do some web design. There was no question in my mind but that this would be a good investment. (Spoiler alert: It has been.)

Once Mr. Alevei decided to go for it, we got to work on researching and writing his business plan, looking for a location for what would be his new shop, and trying to figure out how we were going to pay for everything that needed to happen to get him up and running. Writing the business plan was a project that turned out to be an excellent fit for many of the skills I have acquired over the years, not in business but in academia. A business plan is like scholarly research. It makes an argument and supports it with evidence. It requires a ton of research and a compelling narrative. Basic English-major stuff. It has to make the case to lenders and other potential investors that the proposed business will be a solid investment.

In order to make our case, we had to conduct a market analysis, develop viable sales and marketing strategies, articulate both a mission and a vision (not the same thing, it turns out), analyze our position in relation to the shops and dealerships who would be our competitors, develop and articulate a brand identity, and of course spell out our projected start-up costs, operating costs, and revenue assumptions, all of which then had to be connected to the overall market and presented – and justified – in excruciating and itemized detail. Our start-up costs included things like capital purchases (the equipment and supplies Mr. Alevei would need to start working on cars initially and projections for additional capital investments over time), real estate costs, insurance, permits and inspections, and personnel, although at the beginning it was just Mr. Alevei on the clock something like 80 hours a week and me making a hash of the books on Saturdays.

I handled a lot of the research and analysis and wrote the narrative. Mr. Alevei created the spreadsheets that outlined our cost and revenue assumptions and projections, producing multiple versions that explored and applied several possible cost and revenue permutations and contingencies and made predictions about cashflow and about profit and loss through the first twelve months. He drew up balance sheets and we prepared personal financial statements. We estimated labor costs, average sales, profit margins for parts, taxes and fees. I was happier to be finished with the business plan than I was when I finished my doctoral dissertation five years earlier.

In other words, we totally built that.

And in the process, we were very fortunate to have access to quite a few publicly funded resources, including our local library, which offers seminars and mentoring opportunities for people interested in starting new businesses and also has a large collection of relevant books and other media. Mr. Alevei took a course on business planning and was in every way the brains behind our many spreadsheets. We met with a mentor from SCORE, a nonprofit association funded by the Small Business Administration to support entrepreneurship. On a completely volunteer basis, our SCORE mentor took the time read our business plan and give us feedback.

Our biggest break of all came in the summer of 2007, when Mr. Alevei called the Michigan Small Business and Technology Development Center (MI-SBTDC), which is also supported by federal (SBA) funding to help new and growing businesses. The MI-SBTDC set us up with a mentor, although guardian angel might be a better description. Our mentor provided numerous hours of hands-on support, including extensive assistance as Mr. Alevei wrangled with those spreadsheets, as well as moral support, helping to keep our spirits up during some difficult times, such as when we were worried that we would not get financing, could not find an appropriate and affordable location for the shop, did not see how we were ever going to be able to make it happen. That mentor has become a dear and beloved friend, and he is still an invaluable source of knowledge and support to Mr. Alevei. All the services and support he provided to us were available at zero cost to us.

So yeah, we built it. But we did not do it by ourselves. We couldn’t have.

Mr. Alevei opened his shop on November 1, 2007. We are really looking forward to celebrating his five years in business two months from now. I could not be more proud of Mr. Alevei, who over the past five years has worked until 2 a.m. more times than I can count, sometimes coming home and sleeping only three hours before getting up to do it all over again. He deserves all the credit for the thriving and still-growing business he has built. No one could have worked harder or been smarter, more resourceful, or more determined. And today, in addition to himself, he also employs two full-time technicians, a full-time service manager, a part-time accountant, and a part-time support staffer.

Mr. Alevei created those jobs. And as he would be the first to agree, so did I.

Yes, my $23,000 investment in the company is part of it (an investment that has been paid back in full, by the way), and my work on that excruciating business plan is too. And yes, there was also the labor I contributed for the first six months, when I kept the books. Sure, I did this work badly, but I would point out here that (a.) I did it badly for free, and (b.) sucking at it made the it even more difficult and unpleasant. (On the plus side, the experience was heartening for me in its clear affirmation of my decision at age 18 not to major in accounting.)

But here’s the part they really don’t teach you in school or anywhere else when you’re trying to start a business (and I mean the kind business that requires significant outlays of capital, the kind that really does create jobs): Even if you are ridiculously fortunate and your business does well right out of the gate (alevei!), it is still almost certainly going to take some time before it generates enough profit for you to take home a paycheck at all, let alone before you can take home a paycheck that’s anywhere near enough to live on. So if you don’t have a lot of savings that you can live on and that somehow does not have to go into the business, or if you can’t get the kind of business loan and line of credit (which Mr. Alevei and I can tell you can be very hard to get at start-up) that makes it possible for you to survive for as long as it takes for the business to establish itself and start earning you a living, you’re going to be looking at the possibility of some very hard times. [2]

And so it is the case that sometimes even businesses that are doing OK, even businesses that are doing well, don’t make it. They don’t make it for no other reason than that their owners aren’t making it. It’s not because they aren’t working hard enough and it doesn’t necessarily mean they aren’t doing it right. But if an individual’s livelihood or a family’s livelihood has to be staked entirely on the business, it is going to be very, very difficult for the individual or the family to buy itself the time that any new business is going to need to start making a living for anyone.

And that’s where this New York Times-subscribing, NPR-listening, Hillary Clinton-loving, foreign-car-driving, Obama-supporting, state employee public sector union professor comes in.

Because it was my paycheck (the one some people don’t think I deserve) and my health insurance (which some people criticize as overly generous) that made it possible for my family to keep a roof over our heads, food on our table, and clothes on our backs (not to mention keeping the student-loan kneecap-busting brigade away from our door while I kept up the outrageous monthly payments that will add up to triple what I borrowed before it’s all over).

It was my paycheck – my below-market state employee’s paycheck – that bought the shop the time it needed, bought Mr. Alevei and me the time we needed so that he could have the chance to put everything he had into making his business the success it is today. There is simply no way that we could have survived long enough without my paycheck for the shop to succeed and to create those five good-paying, secure jobs that did not exist in 2007. And even with this level of success, I still could not possibly consider quitting my day job any time soon.

So let’s hear it for the job-creators, all of them, not just those lucky few who are well connected and/or amply capitalized and/or create jobs only if they absolutely have to and/or don’t actually create any jobs, not just the “job creators” who really do seem to believe that they built that all by themselves.

And anyone who thinks that state employees are a drain on the system, that we don’t deserve the middle-class existence we are fortunate to enjoy (for the time being, anyway), that our below-market salaries are still somehow a bad investment of public funds should know this: The percentage of state university budgets that actually comes from state appropriations is at an all-time low nationwide as state legislatures increasingly divert public money away from public education.

So, not only did I work my ass off for those (semi-)state-funded paychecks in a demanding full-time job that I am actually pretty damn good at, but the contributions to actual, tangible job creation that this public-sector union-member has made have not depended on any government grants or loans or contracts. This is in contrast to every single “I built that” bullshit artist who took the stage at the Republican National Convention last week to support Mitt Romney‘s campaign and proclaim their self-righteous, rugged-individualist, free-market, all-by-myself bootstrap delusions to anyone delusional enough to fall for them.

Rep. Upton concludes his op-ed thusly:

A responsible general would never lead an army into battle without the weapons and resources needed for victory.  In the fight for our economic recovery, we can no less give our employers the certainty and resources they need to succeed.

I wonder if he is talking about “employers” like Mr. Alevei and me. But given that the federal tax rate we pay here in the Alevei household is twice the “job creator” rate that GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney says he pays, and I don’t see Rep. Upton, his party, or their presidential nominee making a case that Mr. Alevei and I deserve a big tax break or really any kind of break at all, I have to say I doubt it.

Notes:

[1] See “Employer Responsibility Under the Affordable Care Act,” an analysis and report by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. You might as well take a look at it, because there’s a good chance that your House representative hasn’t.

[2] And don’t forget that you are somehow going to have to start making the payments on those loans and lines of credit right out of the gate. And so although it left us pretty significantly undercapitalized, we ultimately decided against taking out a start-up loan or line of credit, and instead decided to make a go of it on my $15,000 cash advance, Mr. Alevei’s cashed-in 401K, and $8,000 that I inherited from my grandma, for the following reasons:

a. No bank would consider lending us less than $40,000 and most preferred to make loans larger than even that.

b. The interest rates quoted to us even during those pre-crash halcyon days of summer 2007 were astronomical – double digits. Those were the rates reserved for people like us, i.e. people without a lot of savings or family money, just starting out in business.

c. Repayment of the start-up loan would be tied to the length of our commercial property lease, which was three years.

d. The monthly payment on a $40,000 loan at 12% to be paid back within three years was more than our monthly mortgage payment. A lot more. We knew there would be no way we could possibly make those payments, living as we would be on a single paycheck.

Best Episode Ever

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I don’t know whose idea it was to have Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes guest-host, or who picked the screwball comedy “2012 Republican National Convention,” but this is hands-down the funniest episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 EVER.

Bonus: Gov. John Kasich (R-OH) pretending to be charismatic = priceless and adorable.