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Friday, March 12, 2004

National outrage:  Kerry calls liars “liars”

The full item is here, first few paragraphs below.  And may I propose that we simply call the Bush administration the Crooked Lying Group, or CLG, for easy blogging reference?

Bush administration ordered Medicare plan cost estimates withheld

By Tony Pugh
Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON - The government’s top expert on Medicare costs was warned that he would be fired if he told key lawmakers about a series of Bush administration cost estimates that could have torpedoed congressional passage of the White House-backed Medicare prescription-drug plan.

When the House of Representatives passed the controversial benefit by five votes last November, the White House was embracing an estimate by the Congressional Budget Office that it would cost $395 billion in the first 10 years. But for months the administration’s own analysts in the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services had concluded repeatedly that the drug benefit could cost upward of $100 billion more than that.

Withholding the higher cost projections was important because the White House was facing a revolt from 13 conservative House Republicans who’d vowed to vote against the Medicare drug bill if it cost more than $400 billion.

Rep. Sue Myrick of North Carolina, one of the 13 Republicans, said she was “very upset” when she learned of the higher estimate.

“I think a lot of people probably would have reconsidered (voting for the bill) because we said that $400 billion was our top of the line,” Myrick said.

Five months before the November House vote, the government’s chief Medicare actuary had estimated that a similar plan the Senate was considering would cost $551 billion over 10 years. Two months after Congress approved the new benefit, White House Budget Director Joshua Bolten disclosed that he expected it to cost $534 billion.

Richard S. Foster, the chief actuary for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which produced the $551 billion estimate, told colleagues last June that he would be fired if he revealed numbers relating to the higher estimate to lawmakers.

“This whole episode which has now gone on for three weeks has been pretty nightmarish,” Foster wrote in an e-mail to some of his colleagues June 26, just before the first congressional vote on the drug bill. “I’m perhaps no longer in grave danger of being fired, but there remains a strong likelihood that I will have to resign in protest of the withholding of important technical information from key policy makers for political reasons.”

Well, now we know what it takes to get fired from the Bush administration.  Massive security failures . . . nope.  Doctoring intelligence information in order to start a war . . . nope.  Calling a teachers’ union a “terrorist organization” . . . nope.  Telling a bit of the truth about a completely fraudulent bill . . . bingo.

Posted by Michael on 03/12 at 05:31 AM
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Thursday, March 11, 2004

Meanwhile, in other galaxies

Check out the Ultra Deep Field, brought to you by the Hubble Space Telescope (via Sean Carroll).  And while you’re contemplating the mildly-hallucinatory phenomenon of (a) a big powerful telescope that’s not enveloped in this pesky atmosphere of ours (b) collecting, in a one-million-second (about 11-day) exposure, a few stray photons at a time (c) that have traveled roughly 76,440,000,000,000,000,000,000 -82,320,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles over the course of 13 or 14 billion years or so (that would be, hmm, about 13 or 14 billion light years), remind yourself-- if NASA stands by its recent decision to cancel servicing missions to the Hubble, the telescope will fail within a few years and may just come tumbling madly down to Earth in the next decade (don’t take my word for it, heavens no-- read this).  So never mind sending Neil Bush or James Lileks to Mars-- pleasant though the thought may be.  Let’s keep getting a good long look at these weird early galaxies instead.

Not least because Ultra Deep Field-gazing is perfect for when you’re grading papers.  More images here, here, here, and a whole slew of things here.

Posted by Michael on 03/11 at 07:50 AM
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Wednesday, March 10, 2004

The Aesthetics of Cultural Studies

It exists!  The book exists!  --in cyberspace, anyway.  It now has its own url, its very own home on the web, which of course means that you can order it from Blackwell, which of course means that you should do so right now.  No, not when you’ve finished that latte or that absinthe or whatever the hell it is you’re drinking in that cup next to the mousepad.  Right now.

Or at least sometime between now and October, when the book will actually be published.  But you definitely want to be the first person on your block to own a copy.

Posted by Michael on 03/10 at 09:00 AM
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On having lots of free time

I was going to post something weeks ago on the subject of professors who don’t do half their jobs, but I didn’t have the time.  Now, however, one David Lester has illustrated the point quite nicely:  in a brief Chronicle of Higher Ed essay (being discussed around the academic blogs, here, here and here, for example), Lester writes that he finds academic work pretty easy as work goes.  So people should stop complaining.

Well, he has a point-- academics do like to complain, and some of them have absolutely no clue about what the rest of the workforce looks like.  (I remember refereeing a manuscript in which one essayist complained of the “relentless grind” and “misery” of academic work and in the same breath mentioned the pre-tenure sabbatical in which he briefly felt at peace.) But Lester’s essay is-- how shall I say-- a piece of work.  It seems you can decrease a lot of the “stress” of academic life by refusing all committee work, failing to answer your phone, and never showing up at meetings.  Who knew?

OK, deep breath:  I have a fabulous job and I love it.  I’m also the chair of my department’s Personnel Committee (overseeing ten promotion and tenure cases this year), and last year I chaired the Strategic Planning Committee.  I serve on the boards of the Rock Ethics Institute and the Institute for Arts and Humanities, as well as the College’s Curriculum Committee and Research and Graduate Studies Committee.  Since coming to Penn State I’ve also chaired a search committee for a new department head, co-chaired the Governance Document Revision Committee, and served on the Graduate Admissions Committee.  I’m also on the MLA Executive Council, on which I serve on two subcommittees.  And by no means is my record of service unusual-- I have colleagues who do much more than this.

Some of these committees are pro forma; some involve sudden bursts of work that knock out a couple of days in the middle of a semester; and some are absolutely essential to making the workplace work (the Governance Document committee, for example-- the intellectual equivalent of cleaning out the basement-- created a Fixed-Term Review Committee so that non-tenure-track faculty in the Penn State English department had a formal grievance procedure).

All told, committee work can account for anything between zero and thirty hours a week.  It’s not necessarily “stressful"-- in fact, I’m on a committee whose charge it is to ban the use of word “stress” altogether-- but it is time-consuming. 

There’s another kind of invisible faculty labor (again, not very stressful) that some people don’t do, namely, refereeing.  Each year I write about three or four letters for promotion and tenure cases, and read about a dozen manuscripts (articles and books) for various journals and presses, as well as proposals, fellowship applications, and so forth.  That’s actually a fairly light load, but if you want to do it right, it takes time and care-- and you want to do it right, because when it’s done wrong, it’s terrible for everyone concerned (applicants, candidates, presses, the profession, the environment, the universe).  Which leads me to a point that no one has ever made in the entire history of blogging.

Namely, that there’s an easy way to get out of all this committee work and refereeing work.  Simply declare that your entire profession is made up of charlatans and frauds! Yes, that’s right, announce to the world that your colleagues are craven or corrupt or politically correct-- that they no longer care about literature, say, or that they simply don’t meet your exacting intellectual standards, and guess what?  Very few people in your profession will trouble you for your considered, written opinion on the intellectual merits of your colleagues’ work!  Likewise, all you need to do to exempt yourself from the tedious, time-wasting reading of dissertations is to opine publicly that today’s dissertations are not worth reading!

I’ve been amazed by this phenomenon ever since my first weeks as an assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign:  some (not all, but some) of the most scathing indictments of my profession come from people who no longer do any substantial work in it.  (And, of course, they construe this as a sign of their virtue.) I’ve seen people decline to review their junior colleagues on the grounds that they no longer have any interest in the work of the “younger generation” of scholars; I’ve seen senior colleagues publish books in which they claim that graduate students are jargon-spouting careerists who fail to meet the classes they’re assigned to teach (this is a real example, folks)-- but who (of course) do not know a damn thing about the graduate programs and graduate students in their own department.  These people think they’re lonely, principled voices of wisdom in the wilderness-- and meanwhile, they’ve basically said to their colleagues in their department and in their profession, don’t ever trust my judgment on anything pertaining to the workings of the department or the profession.  And as a result, they find themselves with lots and lots of free time.

OK, now back to grading papers.  It’s spring break here in central Pennsylvania-- that’s “spring break” in the sense one speaks of the Holy Roman Empire (i.e., neither holy nor Roman nor an empire)-- so I have a little extra ranting time, but still, work calls.

Posted by Michael on 03/10 at 06:18 AM
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Tuesday, March 09, 2004

The employment of employment

I learned today that Vivian Wagner has published a most generous review of my 1998 book, The Employment of English:  Theory, Jobs, and the Future of Literary Studies in Workplace, the internet’s premier journal of academic labor.  Thanks, Vivian!

I’m reminded of the first internet review the book received-- from James Diedrick at the Authors Review of Books almost six years ago.  And then later in 1998 there was Janet McNew’s somewhat more critical (but still quite nice) review over at the American Book Review.  I should have acknowledged these things long ago, I guess, but I didn’t have a blog then, now, did I.

Posted by Michael on 03/09 at 04:38 PM
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Why no Nona Gerard?

A reader asks why-- if I teach at Penn State, which I do-- I haven’t weighed in on the controversy swirling around the dismissal of Penn State Altoona professor Nona Gerard.

The short answer is this:  I know next to nothing about the reasons for Gerard’s firing.  I agree with Kieran Healy that “firing tenured professors because they are opinionated jerks seems to set a dangerous precedent,” and indeed I would worry that the “opinionated jerk” standard would cover about sixty percent of the professoriate even if it is irrelevant to Gerard.  That’s why, back in January when I first read about Gerard, my sympathies were entirely with her.  At one point, in fact, I expressed those sympathies, saying, more or less, “my instincts tell me that my sympathies should be with Nona Gerard on this.” Whereupon a couple of my colleagues-- not senior faculty, not administrators, just friends (one of whom teaches at Altoona)-- pulled me aside and said, with all due respect, “Michael, with all due respect, you don’t have the faintest idea what you’re talking about on this one.” And they were right; I didn’t.  All I had were my instincts.  University Administration vs. out lesbian leftist theater professor?  Ordinarily, I’d bet the house on the underdog.

But most of the people who’ve commented thus far on Gerard don’t have much more than instinct, either.  Last week Brian Leiter declared that “Penn State leaves the ranks of serious universities” with this decision, and even the more circumspect Timothy Burke (who is always more circumspect, even when he’s dealing with people who shoot from the holster) opens a Crooked Timber comment with “the Penn State case is bad.”

Maybe it is.  We know that the vote was 5-0 against the charge that Gerard failed to perform her duties; 5-0 in favor of the charge of grave misconduct; and 3-2 to rescind tenure.  So we know, at minimum, that there was serious debate among the committee members with regard to the charges brought against Gerard, and that two people who were persuaded that Gerard’s actions (whatever they were) amounted to “grave misconduct” did not agree that this grave misconduct justified the revocation of tenure.

And we also know this:  this isn’t a case like the one at the University of Southern Mississippi, where university president Shelby Thames allegedly locked two professors out of their offices (I hear their computers have been confiscated as well) before initiating dismissal procedures.  Apparently, the grounds for the dismissal are that the professors in question (according to the Chronicle of Higher Education) had been involved in an AAUP investigation of the USM provost:

Mr. Glamser, president of the campus chapter of the American Association of University Professors, said in a telephone interview that he and Mr. Stringer had been suspended because of their involvement with the AAUP’s investigation of the academic credentials of a senior administrator.

In December, according to Mr. Glamser, he received an anonymous packet of information alleging that Angeline Godwin Dvorak, the vice president for research and economic development, had misrepresented herself on various documents as having been a tenured associate professor of English at the University of Kentucky. Ms. Dvorak has denied falsifying her credentials.

The USM Faculty Senate has responded with a 40-0 vote of no confidence in Thames, and apparently-- according to local media-- President Thames has a history of autocratic leadership in his two years at the helm, so this isn’t particularly anomalous.

So with a tip of the cap to Kieran Healy, whose judgment usually seems reasonably sound, I have to think that there really isn’t any plausible linkage between a Penn State case that respected due process and came to a debatable conclusion, and a University of Southern Mississippi case that involved a peremptory lockout of two professors who were involved in an investigation of a senior member of the administration.

Last but not least:  I am not interested in protecting my employer on this one.  My instincts continue to tell me to regard all revocations of tenure with deep suspicion, and besides, I have a long history of denouncing my employers (the University of Illinois, 1989-2001, and Penn State, 2001-present) when the need arises, especially with regard to their dealings with graduate students.  But I think there’s a world of difference between a questionable decision and a manifest outrage.  The Penn State decision should be pursued, and the grounds for Gerard’s dismissal made available for broader review.  And the USM decision should be simply and unambiguously denounced.

UPDATE:  Kieran Healy follows up on his earlier post here, noting “that there just isn’t enough information available to make a judgment” but that “the bar for revoking tenure is pretty damn high.” I agree-- and it’s not clear that the bar was cleared in this case (and apparently two of the committee members didn’t think so either).  I should add, also, that the colleagues who spoke to me about Gerard earlier this year weren’t arguing in favor of revoking her tenure.

UPDATE UPDATE:  Erin O’Connor offers a measured response to this post, in the course of which she writes that she’s “troubled by the passive voice construction” in its penultimate sentence.  Fair enough.  So, who should do the pursuing?  I say the AAUP-- and in the meantime, I will continue to reserve judgment about the substance of the case until I learn more about it.

Posted by Michael on 03/09 at 03:20 PM
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