On Fri, Jul 10, 2009 at 3:40 PM, socialismorbarbarism < socialismorbarbarism at gmail.com> wrote:
> Representatives from both parties (especially from
> the South, bless their hearts) were more or less explicit about this;
> the idea that "the unions" would be allowed anything, even vague
> promises of getting their supposedly contractually-guaranteed pensions
> from some sorta-kinda claim on future earnings, simply galled these
> representatives of the people to no end. "You losers couldn't keep
> your workers in line and damned if we're going to help you"--that was
> the all-but-explicit message. Didn't anybody else hear this?
>
>
In slightly different terms this is exactly what I pointed out to my
undergraduate students here in Michigan, sadly given the long decline of the
industry it is a fairly small percentage of the students who understand that
the quality of their lives - since their parents don't work directly for the
auto industry, even if their grandparents did - is directly associated with
what the representatives and senators just insisted be destroyed. The one
advantage I had was that the mayor of Lansing, Virg Bernero, went off on Fox
news around that time and a number of them had seen it and more or less
gotten the message (not that they felt all that interested in the end...)
It IS easier teaching social strat and class issues than it was over the
past fifteen years but it is still the case that the majority of the
students enervated by the issue still feel completely politically
disempowered in large part because of the depth of their in-grained
individualism or cultural conservatism and its connection with inchoate
populist anger rather than collective political organizing.
But, luckily for me, being a temp, I don't have one of those useless
sinecures folks have been sneering at and I am careful not to commit myself
to the academy because there are so many other places where young people can
learn to see the world in critical social terms... yeah, yeah, yeah, I know
people wrote "most" and they weren't writing about me but... still...
because the academy is and always has been messed up, we're going to write
like it should be thrown under the bus, really?
What's long concerned me has been the almost complete failure of "critical"
faculty to publicly fight the privatization and service-industrifcation of
colleges and universities and the ever-greater demands for meaningless
publications and the production of audits of unit excellence... I hadn't
thought that folks here'd also throw up there hands and that no one would
fight back... however much the public's messed it up, education's a public
good, no?