It's pretty easy to reward people for undertaking extended education; you can give them goods and services -- or just money -- personally. I'm sure most of them would appreciate it. But I don't see an argument in what you have said that makes it clear why other people should do so (unless, of course, they happen to feel the same way; maybe that's the assumption.)
In any case, this sort of differential is different from either productivity pay or combat pay; we might call it conformance pay -- one has obeyed certain rules over a certain period of time and therefore deserves better of the system; a sort of classical-conservative approach. I'm not putting it down; there's a lot to be said for classical conservatism, although it's not my favorite dish.
None of the above -- productivity, combat, conformance -- accord with any leftish political philosophy I'm familiar with. In pure theoretical fundamentalist liberalism, one gets paid by convincing others to give one rewards for _whatever_ reason -- "work", salesmanship, familial or social relations, blind luck. In social-democratic liberalism, the distribution of rewards is gently modified to make sure the losers get a little something. In _Gotha_Program_ socialism, one gets paid according to one's "work", which I think comes down to the same thing publicly administered -- that is, instead of convincing capitalists or customers to give one rewards, one convinces the People or the People's Democratic Tribunal to give one rewards through some kind of performance of which they approve and is thus designated as "work". That leaves anarchism, which I believe has to be communistic -- no special rewards institutionalized there, except possibly those smooches I mentioned. And anyway, we all know what anarchists think of "work".
I put _work_ in quotation marks to emphasize that it has two rather divergent meanings. One is to change the state of the world by expending energy over time -- the meaning in physics. The other is to go through some kind of performance, such as employment, which is vaguely associated with the first kind of work but which may actually change nothing, impede change, or bring about destruction and catastrophe, yet is nevertheless construed and institutionalized as a significant contribution to the human estate, usually according to the dictates of prestige groups and local prejudice.
Yoshie Furuhashi:
> ...
> I believe that the working conditions of tenured faculty cannot be
> maintained, much less improved, while an increasing portion of
> undergraduate instruction is being conducted by non-tenure-track
> teachers. Tenure has already been attacked by such means as
> enrollment quotas (at some community colleges, you need to make the
> quota or else your "tenure" gets taken away, e.g., Seminole Community
> College where Michael Hoover teaches), "post-tenure reviews," etc.
Well, should some people get tenure when I (a commercial computer programmer) and the people who wash toilets and drive buses for me don't? Why should the toilet-washers and bus- drivers support this sort of thing?
I'd say the working conditions of tenured faculty are being dragged down by the political deterioration of the working class generally. I don't think academics are going to be exempt from the decay unless there's some sudden change in the way the ruling class does its thing. I suppose there was once a time when the higher layer of academics were closely associated with the bourgeoisie and could get some favors, but they seem to have been cast out.
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