Mar 13 2023
There's a lot of attention being paid to the Trump administration's attacks on higher ed, but the “leadership” of higher ed—the presidents, the boards of trustees—have been hollowing out higher ed for decades by following a neoliberal low road model. All the people on the board of trustees, not just here at Loyola, but at most colleges and universities, are not educators. They don't know anything about how education, or research for that matter. There are businesspeople. Once upon a time that made sense because their job was to raise money. But now with the rise of, “we need to run everything like a business,” they have imposed not just a business model on the school, but the McDonald's business model—the low road business model of “don't invest in people, hyper exploit them.”
Members of the leadership team of the SEIU 73 Faculty Forward Union representing non-tenure-track faculty in the College of Arts and Sciences at Loyola University Chicago update us on their 14-month-old fight for a fair contract. NTT faculty Matt Williams, Paige Warren, Sarita Heer, and Deb Goodman discuss the precarity and exploitation facing faculty at Loyola and on campuses across the United States and the union's efforts to bargain collectively at a corporatized university. We will follow up with them next Tuesday after strike authorization votes have been tallied.
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Mar 1 2023
Posted by Matthew Boedy
I wept no bitter tears when Scott Adams’s “Dilbert” cartoon was dropped from the Cleveland Plain Dealer after he posted a video wherein he declared:
"Based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from Black people. Just get the f*ck away… Wherever you have to go, just get away. Because there’s no fixing this. This can’t be fixed. So I don’t think it makes any sense as a white citizen of America to try to help Black citizens anymore. It doesn’t make sense. There’s no longer a rational impulse. So I’m going to back off on being helpful to Black America because it doesn’t seem like it pays off.”
My non-existent tears remained unembittered when several other papers followed the Plain Dealer’s lead, even though I know we will all miss Scott’s noble contributions to the Black equality discussion and his substantial aid to Black communities. Even though I feel like we’ve lost Paul Robeson, Fred Hampton, and Muhammed Ali all over again.
But then I realized Scott wouldn’t have wanted me to feel any such loss anyway. He isn’t about feelings. He’s about offices and data and demonically elitist dogs in computer chairs.
I come not only to condemn Scott Adams, creator of “Dilbert,” but to bury him.
We are a nation of schadenfreude. That’s the kind of audience we are. When a bigot or bigshot gets taken down, as Andrew Tate was in Rumania, the audience laughs and cheers. Tate’s case is especially funny because the cause of his downfall was his own preening ego which led to his unprovoked reactionary attack on a teenage climate activist. I mean, there’s not much funnier than Tate being grabbed for sex trafficking by Rumanian law enforcement tipped off to his presence in the country by his braggadocious video with a locally branded pizza box in the camera frame, unless it’s Greta Thünberg’s parting words to seal the flame war: “this is what happens when you don't recycle your pizza boxes."
The bully was an obvious bully, the victim refused to be a victim, and in the end the “good guy” won in a way that was highly amusing and poetically just.
However, when good guys and bad guys are not so easily distinguishable, but a clearcut distinction in imposed on... read more
Episode 1561
Clean Up or Cover Up? ChemTrain Capitalists & Lobbied Lawmakers Say 'Trust Our Tests' / Prem Thakker
Feb 21 2023