Envy Is Why They Hate The Jews

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An old Russian joke tells about a poor peasant whose better-off neighbor has just gotten a cow. In his anguish, the peasant cries out to God for relief from his distress. When God replies and asks him what he wants him to do, the peasant replies, “Kill the cow.” (Charles Colson)

Otto Fors is a Left Voice columnist who can barely conceal his antisemitism. He apparently believes that if he only substitutes the word "Jew" with "Zionist," then he is somehow rendered innocent of being antisemitic. Demanding "kill all the Jews" is too blatant, but executing all Zionists is perfectly A-OK. The conceit is while "Jew" is a racial/ethnic/religious category, "Zionist" is a political opinion--one that is punishable by death.  Any fair-minded person can see through the charade.

Mr. Fors contributes a piece in Left Voice with the sub-heading Establishment Democratic candidates are being defeated by anti-Zionist challengers. The movement for Palestine has made support for Israel toxic — let’s keep it up! There are at least two things wrong with this:

1. "Anti-Zionist challengers" should be replaced with "anti-Jewish challengers."
2. "Movement for Palestine" should be replaced with "movement for Hamas."

Since when did Hamas do anything for the Palestinians? They certainly did them no favors on October 7th, 2023 when Hamas murdered nearly 1200 people in an unprovoked attack on Israel. The entirely predictable Israeli response has not in any way benefited the Palestinians in Gaza. 

Hamas is loudly, proudly and unambiguously antisemitic. Their key demand is Free Palestine, which means a Palestine that is cleansed of Jews. The Jews should be expelled, or better yet, exterminated. Anybody who supports Hamas--as Mr. Fors does--supports the extermination of the Jews.

Mr. Fors quotes former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, who claims his opinion is "grounded in a sincere commitment to Israel’s future security and prosperity." In our comrade's opinion this convicts him of "Zionism." But why can't Mr. Fors champion Israeli prosperity? For any prosperity is better than none at all. The Arab populations in Israel and the West Bank are definitely richer than their counterparts in other countries because Israel is prosperous. Does Mr. Fors really think they'd be better off poorer?

And that's what reminds me of the Russian joke. Like the Russian peasant, Mr. Fors doesn't care at all if Arabs are impoverished. He just wants to kill the Israeli "cow," ie, the economy. He is not motivated by justice or well-being--his passion is purely envy. He doesn't hate the Jews because they're evil, but instead because they're successful.

Mr. Fors identifies himself as "...a college professor in the New York area." I googled his name and discovered no mention of him on any college faculty list. Sometimes adjunct faculty aren't listed by name, or perhaps he's an unemployed professor. Either way, the man is not successful in his chosen career. Presumably he has a Ph.D. degree, which means he's invested a huge amount of time in academia, and likely has no other skill that qualifies him for any other job.

Higher education is a shrinking or possibly dying industry, beset with all kinds of problems: demographics, artificial intelligence, and political polarization to name just a few. Getting a job in higher ed is really, really hard these days, so it's no surprise that Mr. Fors is a failure. Though he should've known better--all those years spent in a useless Ph.D. program should have been enough to teach him a thing or two.

Anyway, Mr. Fors looks up, and what he sees are a whole bunch of aging tenured professors in whose footsteps he wishes to follow. A lot (perhaps 30%) of those old folks are Jewish, who entered the profession (like me) a long time ago when the odds were much better. And our comrade is just green with envy! That is why he hates the Jews.

He's not alone. The two Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) ladies who upset longstanding Democratic incumbents in the recent New York congressional primaries are both rabidly antisemitic.

According to the NY Post

Scandal-plagued far-left congressional hopeful Darializa Avila Chevalier attended an anti-Israeli rally in the Big Apple one day after Hamas’ horrific Oct. 7 massacre in Israel, according to reports.

The 32-year-old radical with a twisted history of bashing Israel joined a hateful Times Square mob on Oct. 8, 2023, that torched the Israeli flag and flashed swastikas after hundreds of Jews were slaughtered by Islamic terrorists in a surprise attack on the Jewish state.

Chevalier, who is gunning for Democratic Rep. Adriano Espaillat’s seat in New York’s 13th House District, justified her attendance by declaring she is simply a lifelong advocate of Palestine.

Her colleague, Claire Valdez, is equally against the Jews, demanding an "end to the genocide." Odd because there is no genocide (only a small fraction of Gaza's 2.3 million inhabitants have died in the war), and the suggestion evokes the medieval blood libel against the Jews--that Jews suck the blood of gentile babies as part of their secret rites.

Anyway, will it surprise us that both of these ladies are frustrated academicians? From Wikipedia (footnotes omitted):

Avila Chevalier began a PhD program in sociology at the Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York, becoming a doctoral candidate by 2025. Her research has focused on immigration law and policy and incarceration in the United States, especially on the ways Black immigrants from Latin America have been affected by the US criminal justice system and deportation.

 and

Valdez received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, studying painting and art history. She worked a series of service jobs, including at Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, and Trader Joe's, before moving to New York City to pursue a career in art.

Neither these ladies nor Mr. Fors are members of the oppressed working class. Instead they're overeducated, no-longer-young adults who have discovered that all their book-learning has not delivered on the promise of upper middle class jobs in the professoriate. They take it out on the Jews.

Some months ago I read a terrifying article in Left Voice authored by Otto Fors. It described pro-Hamas demonstrations in the New York suburb of West Orange, NJ, which Mr. Fors described as "heavily Zionist." As mentioned, Zionist is his synonym for Jewish, and he is correct--West Orange is approximately 30% Jewish, including a large Orthodox community. According to Mr. Fors, the "Zionists" objected to pro-Hamas demonstrations in their public parks.

And they're right to be upset! Hamas' demand is the extermination of Israel's Jews, and if you take their slogan Globalize the Intifada literally, they demand the extermination of all Jews around the world, including those in W. Orange. In Mr. Fors' telling, the Jews were unreasonably objecting to the such antisemites rallying in public parks. The circumstance reminds one of Skokie, IL, where back in 1978 a group of Neo-Nazi protesters wanted to march through the Jewish suburb.

I made a mental note of the article, intending to comment on it, only to discover that it had been scrubbed from the web. Perhaps my memory deceives me--maybe there was no such article? Maybe Mr. Fors didn't write it? If somebody knows better, please message me in the comments. But I think the mask slipped too far--the piece was just too obviously an embarrassing expression of rank antisemitism.

Because the claque of failed academics who write for Left Voice hate the Jews--Otto Fors first among them. It's a passion born of envy.

Further Reading:

• Left Voice Antisemites Speak Out
• Iranian-American Demands Death to Israel
• Left Voice Demands 5 Things of UAW's Shawn Fain

Professor Hoff & Harvard

 

Professor James Dennis Hoff pens a piece over at Left Voice entitled Trump’s Attacks on Harvard Are About State Power — Not Antisemitism. His main claim is at least partly right.

Though the Trump administration, like the Biden administration before it, is using Title VI civil rights legislation to justify a crackdown on universities like Harvard, it’s clear that these attacks are not really about antisemitism or bias; they are about punishing the movement for Palestine and the Left and asserting more direct ideological control of academia.

It is true that the crackdown on academe is not primarily about antisemitism, but antisemitism surely plays a role. Thugs who falsely claim to be "pro-Palestinian" are illegally occupying campus grounds and vandalizing buildings while carrying Hamas flags and shouting Hamas slogans--slogans that explicitly call for the extermination of the world's Jews. This is intolerable, especially when the thugs are in significant portion foreign students.

But Professor Hoff is surely correct that the major focus is something else. He describes Trump as "Bonapartist," a term which confused me. In 2017 Left Voice posted a piece entitled Trump: A Weak Bonapartist Government, which I found unhelpful. ChatGPT is more useful. It replied (excerpted)

The bourgeoisie is too weak or divided to rule directly, and the working class is too immature or disorganized to take power—so the state acts as a kind of arbiter.

Bonapartism arises during periods of class stalemate, like after a revolution has been defeated or stalled.

Trotsky described it as "the rule of the sword"—a regime where the military or a strongman rules in place of clear class dominance.

I think authoritarian is a reasonably good synonym, and Professor Hoff uses that word elsewhere in his article. It is a common accusation made against Trump by Progressive Democrats, including Professor Hoff.

So is President Trump acting like an authoritarian? I think not--as a comparison with Ron DeSantis illustrates.

Mr. DeSantis took over the New College of Florida in a very authoritarian manner. He fired the board of trustees and replaced them with his own appointees. The trustees, in turn, fired the school president, again replacing her with someone congenial to Mr. DeSantis. Many faculty were let go, or more commonly, chose to leave. The result was a fairly complete transformation from a left-wing to a right-wing institution. Whether you approve of that or not, there is no question that Mr. DeSantis went about it in a very authoritarian way.

Trump is not doing that. He has made no attempt to fire either the president or the board of trustees from either Columbia or Harvard. Instead, he is treating them as he might any other federal contractor, eg, Lockheed-Martin. All such contractors must obey federal regulations in order to keep their contracts, and these days such regulations strongly forbid such items as DEI. Do DEI, says Trump, and you forfeit your federal money.

So I don't think Trump is trying to take over Columbia or Harvard in any way like DeSantis conquered Florida's New College. That's not the goal.

What is Trump's goal? I can't read Trump's mind any better than Professor Hoff, but I can imagine two possible reasons. They're not mutually exclusive.

The first is to fulfill the promise of The Heritage Foundation's Project 2025. This claims that higher education (along with education, generally) is not among the Constitution's enumerated powers given to Congress. According to this strand of Conservative and Libertarian thought, both the Higher Education Act (1965) and the formation of the Department of Education (1979) were (and are) not constitutional. The goal, therefore, is to end all federal aid to colleges & universities (along with K-12 education), and return both the responsibility and the authority to the states.

In this sense the goal is not to defund the universities, but only to eliminate federal funding. State funding for higher ed is up to the individual states, and not part of Trump's agenda. It does seem that Trump is dead serious about ending all federal funding. We'll have to see what the courts have to say about this.

I happen to agree with the Heritage Foundation here; I think federal grants to higher ed are, indeed, unconstitutional, especially given the large sums awarded to Harvard and Columbia. But perhaps Trump is not all that inspired by constitutional legalities, then there is another reason why he might go after the Ivies.

Trump is first and foremost a political animal. He is methodically attacking the Democrats at their weakest points, eg, men playing on women's sports teams, DEI, deporting MS-13 gangsters, etc. All of these issues poll very well for the GOP, and skepticism about the huge amounts of money given to places like Harvard is equally popular.

Dissing the elite, Ivy League schools is a political plus. More, they have way too much money, hire too many people, and seem to spend money on completely frivolous things. In Trump's mind all higher education is is a Democratic Party patronage machine--similar to Tammany Hall. If you want to kneecap your political opponents, shutting down their access to patronage jobs is surely a good way to do it.

And hence the diligent efforts to defund the universities. It makes sense.

The first bit of evidence is the relentless growth of the sector--and that despite much lower enrollments since the pandemic. Too many people work in academe. These are mostly patronage jobs given to folks who almost unanimously vote for Democrats.

Second, too many people are going to graduate school. This is most obvious in the humanities--where freshly-minted PhDs are competing for very low-paid adjunct positions. Certainly Professor Hoff is aware of the dearth of tenure-track jobs in English departments all across the country.

Students enroll in English graduate programs because 1) they like literature, and 2) the grad programs are heavily subsidized by the government, and hence they can attend school for free and receive a small stipend for doing so. As the old saw goes, if you subsidize something, you get too much of it--and these are mostly patronage jobs. This problem exists not just in humanities disciplines, but also in the sciences. A baccalaureate degree in biology is worth almost nothing on the job market, and a chemistry degree is not far behind.

Third, Professor Hoff touts the research chops of the major universities. He writes, 

Even at the height of the student protest movements in the 1960s, the federal government continued to expand investments in research and higher education mostly without strings attached. And why not? Research universities not only helped to train a caste of highly competent business leaders and worker-managers, (not to mention less prestigious skilled workers) but produced some of the most profitable and deadly technological innovations of the century, helping the U.S. to develop and maintain its economic and military dominance over the globe for much of the second half of the twentieth century.

This may have been true in the 1960s, but it is much less true today. As noted, we have far too many "business leaders and worker-managers." Academic research has also lost its mojo: we're paying for quantity rather than quality, and much of the research done today is published just to let PhD students graduate. We could cut the research budget by half and not impinge on scientific progress at all.

Beyond which, scientific research is also not among the enumerated powers of Congress. So apart from that narrowly tailored to defense needs, it probably shouldn't be paid for by the feds. Note that the federal government didn't fund research at scale until after WWII--the power grid, the electric motor, the automobile, the polio vaccine, the airplane, and much else besides were all invented without the feds spending a single dime.

In short, I think Trump is right. Whatever his reasons, federal funding for schools like Harvard and Columbia needs to be zeroed out. 

Further Reading:

• Left Voice and the Economic Crisis
• Malik Miah Defends Harvard
• The Professors Congress: The International Situation

Harvey Graff Defends The Ivory Tower

An ivory tower at All Souls College, Oxford
By Andrew Shiva / Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=32343526

Solidarity usefully reprints a short article by the well-known retired professor and gadfly, Harvey Graff. Entitled The Myth of the Left-Wing Professors, it's accompanied by a short introduction by David Finkel. Key grafs include these:

Among the most distorted and damaging myths of higher education is the ideologically driven and profoundly anti-intellectual myth of “the predominance and indoctrination of left-wing university professors.”...

By “myth,” I do not mean false or fictitious. Regardless of any question of truth or accuracy, myths aren’t circulated or accepted by some people if they do not accord with certain recognizable elements. Nor does falseness limit the spread, selective influence, and damaging effects of myth. That fundamental point is too often missed by media commentators and even among scholars in history, politics, literature or anthropology.

Today’s political and cultural crisis of misrepresentation of professors’ ideological conduct and misconduct can only be understood in historical context. For the full millennium of their history, universities have been avowedly culturally and politically conservative.

I actually agree with much of this. The first paragraph claims that the "myth" has two parts, namely the "predominance" and "indoctrination" of "left-wing university professors." Predominance is mythic because today's professors aren't "left-wing" at all, but are instead merely centrist "liberals," such as dominated American politics from FDR through the Obama administrations. I don't think this is true--today's professors are--by and large--way more reality-deprived than, say, staunch liberals like John Kenneth Galbraith or Daniel Patrick Moynihan. But ok, if Mr. Graff wants to relabel professors as "liberal," then sure--I'll let him have at it. But just for clarity I'll describe the polarization in this country as being "left" and "right," even if it's not precise terminology.

Mr. Graff denies that professors engage in "indoctrination." I agree with him there. It's not like they don't try--it's rather that they don't succeed. I think the fastest growing political groups on campuses these days include the Young Republicans--a phenomenon almost certainly in response to the very illiberal political correctness and kooky wokeness that now dominates faculty opinion.

Mr. Graff's second paragraph is more true than he probably realizes. People--on both the left and right--don't choose their opinions on the basis of "facts" or dispassionate argument. Instead we engage in status competitions with each other. Our opinions reflect group affiliation and shared values. Mr. Graff is clearly a cheerleader for his left group, as witnessed by the irrational and emotional invective he directs toward his political enemies.

The third paragraph is the truest of all. Professors were not just conservative in the past, but they're ultra-conservative today. I think reactionary is a better description. They steadfastly try to maintain the sanctity of the faculty guild. They're against most technological progress, notably fracking and, more recently, artificial intelligence. Some of them even want to ban airplanes!

Mr. Graff's view hearkens back to a time when university faculty derived their status from medieval guilds. In those days literacy was rare, books were reproduced by copying by hand, and nobody had yet invented the e-reader. The faculty really was a special bastion of literacy and learning. Some of this still obtained back when I was a grad student: the chemistry literature filled an entire library of bound volumes, to which only members of the academy had access.

But today all residue of guild privilege has evaporated. Research results are now distributed on-line, and important results made public long before the referees have put on their eye-glasses. Indeed, the whole referee/gate-keeping/publication treadmill seems hopelessly out of date. Today's coin of the realm are blog posts, social media conversations and YouTube videos. The professors are left in the dust.

It looks to get worse. These days AI can complete almost any homework assignment in the undergraduate curriculum. I have no idea what the future effect of that will be, but enhanced status for the professoriate does not seem a likely outcome.

Today's professors have competition from all sorts of very smart people outside of academe. And if there's one thing that professors can't stand, it's competition. The faculty want to put that competition back in the box, and to reassure academics that they still have access to the special rights and privileges not granted to other citizens under the Constitution. These privileges come under the rubric of academic freedom.

Which may be briefly summarized this way:

1. Faculty should have a right to tenure.
2. Faculty should have unlimited power to hire and tenure other faculty.
3. Faculty should be totally in charge of the curriculum.
4. Faculty should get unlimited funds from federal and state governments which they can spend any way they want with no accountability whatsoever.

Academic freedom is what defines the ivory tower, which Mr. Graff races to the ramparts to defend.

So I get it. One hires math professors to teach mathematics, and it would probably be wise to leave the curriculum up to them. Regards hiring, obviously math professors know more about who would be a good math professor than, say, somebody in the state legislature. That is the justification for academic freedom, and on some level it makes sense.

But even there it must have limits. If the scholarly interests of a professor (eg, algebraic geometry) are too far removed from what the students are studying (eg, precalculus), and if the professor's tenure is determined by other faculty based on scholarly output more than precalculus pedagogy--then at some point things just go off the rails. One hires the wrong people for the wrong reasons.

There has to be some outside oversight--even math professors need a boss, and academic freedom must have limits. If that's true for mathematicians, it is much more true for disciplines in the humanities and social sciences--disciplines which more strongly affect what taxpayers in their state or country believe.

You can't have a sociologist who--in his professional life--advocates closing all prisons while citizens are suffering under a high crime rate. The sociology professor--when speaking as a professor--has to represent opinions that are at least within shouting distance of what citizens and taxpayers can understand as rational.

As a private citizen, a sociology professor can mouth off whatever crackpot opinions she wants. But in the classroom she has some limits. She has to be sane. I once knew a biology professor who passionately believed in the existence of space aliens. That's fine; it's a free country. But that opinion has no place in a biology classroom, and when he started discussing space aliens in every class, he got fired.

The typical name for the realm of respectable discourse is often called the Overton Window. I think the Overton Window should be as big as possible, but not infinitely big. More important, the Overton Window should be determined by those who are paying the bills. For a state school, that would be the state legislature. For a private school, it would be the Board of Trustees.

Mr. Graff--rather oddly, because he should know better--conflates academic freedom with free speech. He writes:

Ohio’s new state-mandated (anti-) diversity centers on five public university campuses is a major transparent case in point. Based on false claims and anti-intellectual, anti-diversity mandates, they substitute limited views and narrow requirements. State Senator Jerry Cirino’s legislative efforts to reduce public higher to a tragic mockery of freedom of speech and fact-based pursuit of knowledgeable interpretation sputter — rising again with SB1 passing recently.

In other words, the Ohio state legislature has determined that "diversity" lies outside the Overton Window for university faculty in Ohio. That may or may not be the proper limit (I think it's probably too restrictive), but the state legislature has every right to pass that law.

We all have a constitutional right to free speech. But nobody has a constitutional right to be a professor in the state of Ohio. If you are a professor in the state of Ohio, then you need to live within the Overton Window in your professional life. In your personal life (eg, on your private Facebook account) you can say whatever you damn well please.

Free speech for individuals is absolute. Speech by academics acting within their professional capacity has to be within bounds that benefit the community and the institution. Those limits are ultimately set by the people who pay the bills. It can't be otherwise.

Further Reading:

• CUNY PSC Can't Help HEOs
• Malik Miah Defends Harvard
• Henry Giroux Defends the Faculty Guild

Trump & the Working Class

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Left Voice authors Professor James Dennis Hoff and Jason Koslowski, write an article entitled Is the U.S. Labor Movement Ready for Trump 2.0?. It's a very long article and I'm not going to go through it line by line. But it is truly weird that intelligent, supposedly well-informed people--professors even--should get it all so spectacularly wrong.

They fail in three ways:

1. They don't understand class struggle.
2. They don't understand the role of the unions.
3. They don't know what "solidarity" means.

After an introductory paragraph describing the way Trump--at the behest of the "ruling class"--will "attack" unions, our two academics write

Building a labor movement that can fight these attacks and grow stronger in the process will require not only a radical break with the business unionism of the past, but the active organization and mobilization of the entire working class. It’s up to rank-and-file workers to protect ourselves, not just against the hammer blows on unions that are coming our way, but against the devastating attacks on the working class meant to divide our power, like mass deportations and bigoted anti-trans legislation. 

Their model of society is that the "working class" is in an all-or-nothing, fight-to-the-death struggle against the bourgeoisie--aka the "ruling class." Of course this is wrong--for otherwise why have the workers put up with "business unionism" for all these decades (if not centuries)? The only answer our academic friends offer is that the workers are too stupid to behave otherwise. What they require is leadership from somebody who knows better and who can lead them to the promised land.

Obviously, if all you need for your liberation is a bunch of know-it-alls who've got everything figured out for you, then who better to ask than a couple of college professors? Even better--these college professors imagine themselves as part of the Vanguard Party. There you go--problem solved. Just follow whatever they say and all will turn out just fine.

For proof, just ask the folks in Cuba, Venezuela or North Korea to describe the benefits of following a Vanguard Party.

The problem with our professor-friends' account of reality is that it's wrong. Workers and their bosses do have disagreements, and there is something to fight about. But mostly they're on the same side, that is, both benefit when the firm--both workers and bosses--increases total revenue. They can argue about how the revenue is divided between them, but without the revenue, then there's nothing to fight over.

Have you ever wondered why Starbucks baristas work so hard to get your drink precisely right? It's not just that the boss will get mad if they don't--but even worse, their fellow employees will be just as mad. That's because--deep down, in their heart of hearts--everybody in the store knows that if the customer isn't happy, then the baristas are not long for employment.

The mantra of capitalism is shop till you drop. The mark of a successful capitalist society is a high level of consumption. Because without customers there will be no revenue, and without revenue, nobody--neither worker nor boss--is gonna make any money. The customer is always right! 

The leadership that our academics deride as "business unionism" understands this. A "business union" works to maximize revenue--and then also maximize the fraction of which is paid to the workers. That's why, for example, the UAW was very selective about its strike targets. They understood that a general strike would cut revenue to zero and hurt the workers more than the bosses. So even when on strike, unions try very hard to maintain or even increase revenue.

Our academic friends will never defeat business unionism, because that's the strategy that makes the most sense for workers. Workers, after all, are smarter than academics for one important reason, ie, academics don't have any customers. They get paid by the government no matter how bad they are at their jobs. That's especially true for Professor Hoff, who is a tenured professor--which means regardless of incompetence he can't be fired. His work life is completely different from that of a Starbucks barista.

So the professors misunderstand the working class and the role of unions. But even the unions don't understand the role of unions! That's because--like every other large organization--they evolve into a self-interested bureaucracy. The union is often more interested in maximizing its own revenue rather than the wages of its members. In extreme cases the union is taken over by the Mafia and simply becomes an extortion racket. Las Vegas casinos are mostly unionized--thanks to the diligent efforts of the Chicago Outfit to skim as much revenue off the top as they could. The workers didn't benefit at all.

Even honest unions have to worry about their income--will they earn enough money in dues to make up for the cost of organizing? For retail businesses the answer seems to be mostly No. Neither Starbucks nor Amazon have profit margins big enough to make it worthwhile for a union to organize them. That's why the Teamsters' Union will likely never succeed at getting a contract at Amazon's JFK8 warehouse. The fledgling Starbucks union will be equally unsuccessful, for the same reason. The profit margins (typically 3%) are too small to keep a union solvent.

Our professor friends never have to worry about that. Colleges and Universities don't have to make a profit. The teachers' unions are really good at ripping off taxpayers. That's why they don't understand the conflict between unions and their members.

Finally, we get to "solidarity." This is what the professors write (links omitted):

Without a radical shift in strategy, labor may wind up squandering the relative advantages it still has. 

These include record-high levels of popular support for unions, an increasingly pro-labor workforce made up of young workers ready to organize, and the likelihood of increased class struggle as Trump attempts to carry out the worst of his proposed agenda against workers, immigrants, women, and trans people. A plank of Trump’s platform is the mass deportation of immigrants — which is not just an attack on immigrants, but also a frontal assault on the working class itself, to divide and weaken it. None of our union leaders have spoken yet of this threat. But stopping it requires a labor movement willing to strike for more than its immediate needs at its own workplaces. Stopping Trump here calls for a willingness of workers to strike in solidarity with immigrants and against the state and ICE — technically against the law. Here, again, relying on the state to support unions will weaken us, not strengthen us.

The Militant (published by the Socialist Workers Party) has been touting the abundance of "solidarity" in Cuba for decades now--most recently here. Solidarity is all they've got there--no food, no water, no medicines, no electricity. The next time our gracious professors encounter a homeless bum, I'm sure he'll be grateful for their "solidarity."

Even the professors have to acknowledge that Trump won the votes of the majority of the working class. They attribute this to a combination of workers being stupid, and/or being racist. But our professors are wrong, of course. The working class is a lot smarter than the they are.

For example, Trotskyist academics will have you believe that allowing more immigrants is good for the working class because of "solidarity." Professor Hoff can believe this because he has tenure and therefore never has to look for a job. But most people realize that if you're looking for a job, you're competing with other similarly qualified people. And more, if there are a lot of similarly qualified people then the average wage for those folks will go down. That's Professor Koslowski's problem--he's an adjunct lecturer working for peanuts because there are so many other folks with useless PhDs wanting the same opportunity.

Then consider the bizarre list of folks that somehow deserve our solidarity. Weirdest is the affection for trans people--that 0.5% of society who somehow think they deserve more rights than the rest of us. The professors also insist that all workers show solidarity with the Hamas death cult, which demands the extermination of all Jews. That's not gonna make anybody any richer. It won't even make the Palestinians richer. 

So why did most workers support Trump? That's easy. Trump is for prosperity. Prosperity means more consumption, more revenue, lower taxes, fewer regulations, and smaller government.

Me--I'm also for more prosperity, which is why I voted for Trump. Unlike the folks on the Progressive & Trotskyist Left, whose goal is to destroy civilization and redistribute the carrion to the starving masses. Just like they do in Cuba.

Further Reading:

• The General Strike Fizzles
• The End of Cuban Civilization
• Amazon, Teamsters & Contract

CUNY PSC Can't Help HEOs

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The Defense Department surely wins the contest for having the most acronyms, but a close second must be awarded to higher education. Even I--after 40 years in the business--am still encountering mysterious letter combinations. Today's set comes from a collection of essays entitled Voices From CUNY: Why We’re Voting No on the PSC’s Proposed Contract. The teaser paragraph reads

Workers from eight CUNY colleges speak out against their union’s proposed contract, which includes: inadequate raises for many job titles, workload increases and givebacks on job security for adjunct faculty, and no remote work protections for staff.

CUNY, as most of you likely know, stands for The City University of New York, a collection of 25 campuses from community colleges to graduate schools that purport to serve the citizens of that city. It is New York State's second largest system of public higher education, behind only SUNY (State University of New York), which includes 64 campuses outside the City, with similar scope. I worked for SUNY for most of my career.

Most readers are likely less familiar with PSC, denoting the Professional Staff Congress, which is the teachers' union representing professors and staff. These days that includes everybody from graduate assistants to full professors, along with many staff members. The union tries to capture dues from as many people as possible, even though their benefit in belonging to a union is negligible.

Among those staff members is an acronym I'd never encountered before: HEO. I asked Google AI for assistance.

At CUNY, an "HEO" stands for "Higher Education Officer," referring to a series of non-teaching administrative staff positions within the university, encompassing various administrative roles across different CUNY campuses; essentially, it signifies a professional working in a mid-level administrative role at the university.

I'm still not clear what this means--perhaps it's analogous to the classified services employees at SUNY, eg, secretaries and lower-level administrators. At SUNY those folks have a separate union.

None of the contributors to Voices from CUNY are HEOs, so it's left to Professor James Dennis Hoff to make their case.

The proposed contract also does nothing to secure remote work options for our HEO colleagues. This was the biggest demand for HEOs this contract round, and no progress was made on this question at all. This means that CUNY can end or limit remote work for HEOs anytime it feels like it.

Which is weird. The reason for a physical campus is ostensibly to provide students with one-on-one, in-person instruction. So allowing the HEOs to work from home seems counterproductive. I do know that the secretaries at SUNY are often the front face of the department, welcoming students and answering questions. Or perhaps Professor Hoff thinks that CUNY should move entirely on-line and dispense with in-person classes altogether? In which case everybody could work from home.

Meanwhile, the adjunct faculty are whining to high heaven. A contributor named Kamran writes,

I’m an adjunct at Lehman, and I’m poor, and I hate it. And if this contract goes through, in 2027, I will still be poor, and I will still hate it. $7K was the minimum I think we deserved — 10 years ago. In 2027, it won’t be enough. I will be enthusiastically voting no.

The $7K is payment for a three-credit-hour class, and admittedly it's slim pickings. 
Though at SUNY most adjuncts teach two classes per semester for two semesters per year (and maybe also in the summer)--which then comes to $28,000 per year. Still not much. As Tatiana Cozzarelli, an "adjunct lecturer," writes

Over the summer, I had a dream that we had gotten a contract at CUNY. ... But when I woke up, the reality was so different: I had 30 dollars in my bank account and was borrowing money from friends in order to make ends meet. I needed emergency dental surgery and I had to make a gofundme to pay for it. I’m not the only one. I know adjuncts who are on food stamps, especially over the summer. While CUNY President Felix Matos Rodriguez makes nearly $800,000 a year, adjunct professors just cannot make ends meet.

I have no idea if Mr. Rodriguez is over- or under-paid. But if you take his salary and share it among CUNY's 40,000 full- and part-time employees, the annual raise per employee is about $20. Not enough to get anybody off food stamps. Mr. Rodriguez's salary is--in budget terms--irrelevant.

Ms. Cozzarelli, who identifies as "...a former middle school teacher and current Urban Education PhD student at CUNY," needs to go find another job. Her salary reflects the value of her PhD, which is probably closer to zero. Almost anything she could do, eg, drive an Uber, would pay more and be a greater contribution to society than what she is doing now.

Professor Hoff, who is a member of the union's Delegate Assembly (an elected leadership body), contributes this:

[T]his memorandum of agreement is a pay cut, plain and simple. The proposed across the board wage increases for the life of the contract will equal only 2.82 percent per year. This comes after historic levels of inflation close to twenty percent since 2021. The proposed retroactive wages will do little to make up for that loss and probably will not even keep pace with inflation going forward. Even in the best-case scenario, this contract will actually bake in a nine percent pay cut across the board for all PSC-CUNY members. This comes on top of the lost value that our salaries have suffered since the New Caucus took power in 1999.

In other words, the union got peanuts--despite collecting union dues from Ms. Cozzarelli and her ilk. She's wasting what little money she has. But one has to wonder at the perfidy of the "New Caucus," which agreed to this contract. Why did they do that when it's obviously so bad?

I can think of a number of reasons:

1. Declining enrollments
2. Declining revenues from state and city governments
3. The necessity to keep all the adjuncts and HEOs employed, despite fewer students
4. An inability to continue deferring maintenance.

Etc. In other words, the New Caucus has to face reality. There is no plausible universe in which CUNY has enough money to make everybody happy. 

I think the contributors to Voices from CUNY are all members of what I call the Shutdown Caucus, of which Dr. Hoff is a leading spokesman. These people--who have never seen a strike they didn't like--think every workplace in America should be shut down until the bourgeoisie cough up their horde of gold coins. In particular, they think CUNY should be shut down with all 40,000 employees going unpaid while on strike. The analogy they present are the strikes at Starbucks, Amazon, the auto workers and at Boeing.

What they don't mention is that workers at Starbucks and Amazon, etc., actually do something useful--and for their labor they get paid by their customers. CUNY employees--ie, the professors, HEOs and adjuncts like Ms. Cozzarelli--don't do anything useful. They're effectively on the public dole--and if they went on strike nobody would even care.

They have no customers. Nobody voluntarily pays money to CUNY. Their entire budget is extorted through taxes on pain of imprisonment.

So please--go on strike. Save us all a dime.

Further Reading:

• Trump Won! Professor Hoff Says So
• Whiners & Complainers
• Amazon, Teamsters & Contract

 

Whiners & Complainers

(Source)

Tatiana Cozzarelli must really hate her job! She writes

Another school year is starting at the City University of New York (CUNY).  We’ll arrive on campuses that are dilapidated and falling apart. Broken elevators and escalators plague campuses across the city. Some departments are in a last-minute scramble to hire adjuncts for classes. It’s an affront to us as workers and to our students who deserve a quality education. 

Even though I’ve spent all week preparing for the semester, adjuncts and many others don’t get paid until two weeks into the semester. I have $30 in my bank account and I have to borrow money from friends again. Some adjuncts are on food stamps. Adjunct wages — and wages for most CUNY faculty and staff — are just not enough. We’ve been working with an expired contract for a year and a half, which means a year and a half without raises despite skyrocketing inflation and cost of living in New York City. 

Such is the start of the school year at CUNY. 

Those are the lede paragraphs from an article in Left Voice entitled CUNY Workers and Students Will Write A New Chapter of Class Struggle This Semester. While I never worked for CUNY, I am retired after long service at SUNY, New York's other public college & university system. Like CUNY, SUNY suffers from many of the same problems: declining enrollments, too many faculty & staff for the existing population, an aging infrastructure, and fewer jobs for graduates. Left Voice has covered some of those problems.

I'll take issue with one of Ms. Cozzarelli's claims--from my experience I think she exaggerates CUNY's state of disrepair. On the other matters she is likely correct. Adjuncts and grad students are poorly paid. Of course the reason for the stingy salaries is not because of evil administrators. It's because there are way more adjuncts and grad students available than there are classes for them to teach. Salaries are low to spread the money around as far as possible.

So if it's that bad, why does Ms. Cozzarelli still work there? She really should quit her job. She'd make more money doing almost anything else, eg, driving an Uber car. She identifies herself as a PhD student in "urban education," and she'd probably qualify as a teacher in New York state (and almost any other state). That job would definitely pay better than being an adjunct at CUNY. Why doesn't she do that?

No good reason, I fear. I suppose she wants to be a tenured professor somewhere. I don't know how many professorships there are in "urban education," but it can't be very many. So I think she has unreasonable expectations. Meanwhile, she is being supported in some part by CUNY students' tuition, but mostly by tax dollars from New York State and City taxpayers. In a word, she's on the public dole--aka welfare. If she went and got a real job she'd save us all a lot of money, and also lead a happier life.

Go back and read the above quoted paragraphs again, for what immediately follows is probably the biggest non sequitur of the year.

As I realize that none of the outlets in my windowless classroom work, it’s hard not to think about the billions of dollars being sent to kill Palestinians. There are no universities left in Gaza.

So there you have it. Not only does CUNY have to fix all the outlets and escalators, and pay the adjuncts and grad students more, but CUNY also has to settle the war in Gaza. She probably needs to take that up with her department chair, or if she's serious, even the Dean!

Is Ms. Cozzarelli really so foolish as to believe that some administrator at CUNY is gonna solve the war in Gaza? And why just Gaza? What about the war in Ukraine? Not to mention the starving children of Darfur. She should talk to her Dean about those problems as well.

She's not serious. But wait--Maybe she is? It's "billions" of dollars being wasted in Gaza, and Ms. Cozzarelli has her eyes on that prize. Apparently all of those billions (ALL of them) should be spent on CUNY to fix all the outlets and to give her a big fat raise. What should her salary be? $100K? $300K? Hell, let's go for it--Ms. Cozzarelli should demand at least a million, what with all the moral virtue on her side.

Left Voice author Maryam Alaniz, the daughter of Iranian immigrants, takes her antisemitism anti-Zionism seriously. She really believes that every Zionist in the world should be murdered. As such, she's a strong supporter of Hamas, an outfit she dubs "pro-Palestinian." Hamas is no more "pro-Palestinian" than the Khmer Rouge was pro-Cambodian. Hamas--if given the power--will not just murder all Zionists, but probably the major portion of the Palestinian population as well. It is a death cult, pure and simple.

Ms. Alaniz believes that Israel is exclusively responsible for all civilian war deaths in Gaza. She's wrong. Hamas bears at least half the responsibility--in any war it takes two to tango. The political benefits of dead women and children accrue entirely to Hamas--and discredit Israel. Accordingly, Hamas has worked hard to put as many women and children in harm's way as possible.

She pens an article in Left Voice entitled As Classes Start, Universities Begin a New Wave of Repression Against the Palestine Movement. She writes,

The administrative bureaucracies of the U.S. academy have played a key role since the start of the movement for Palestine to discourage and repress students and staff speaking out against the genocide. In that sense, the university presidents and bureaucracy are strategically linked to maintaining the interests of the bipartisan regime as well as the material interests that many of these universities have with the state of Israel.

There are two obvious errors in these paragraphs.

1. There is no genocide happening in Gaza. The war has gone on for nearly a year now, and Israel has come nowhere close to killing all 2.3 million Gazans. Even if you believe Hamas' inflated figures of about 40,000 dead (not all of whom were civilians), the war has hardly made a dent in the overall population. If Israel were intent on genocide, surely they would have eliminated most Gazans by now. It's not like they don't have the weaponry to do so. Use of the word "genocide" in this context is blatantly dishonest.
2. It is not true that "administrative bureaucracies of the U.S. academy have played a key role ...  to discourage and repress students and staff speaking out against the genocide." Nobody is being discouraged from speaking out. However vile, supporting Hamas and the murder of all Zionists is still protected speech in this country. What is NOT protected is camping out on university property, harassing and threatening other students, disturbing the peace at all hours of the day & night, and committing various acts of vandalism. Universities have an obligation to punish those violent protests.
   
   As an aside, I will add that demanding the murder of all Zionists should disqualify one from a professorship at any American university. There is no constitutional right to a job.

So, apart from her irrational antisemitism anti-Zionism, why does Ms. Alaniz even care? She, too, is a PhD student in NYC, studying who-knows-what (obviously nothing useful), and like her colleague she ardently believes her paycheck welfare check isn't high enough. She writes,

Clearly, the struggle against Zionism within universities has shown the way that these institutions act like businesses and landlords under capitalism, always looking out for their bottom line and afraid to upset their donors. The encampments encouraged us to think of a new kind of university: one that is free, open to the public, run by faculty, staff, and students for the working class and oppressed.

Ms. Alaniz, living as she does off the public dole, is not part of the working class, and she's not oppressed. She's a parasite mooching off other people's tax dollars. What she wants is even more of those tax dollars. She is asking for a blank check, where only the people who spend the money get to allocate it, while the people who pay the money should have no say. 

The third complainer falls into a completely different category. Left Voice author Pola Posen actually has a real job providing real goods and services to consumers around the world. She works at an Amazon warehouse, and writes to complain about how she was mistreated during the Prime Day promotion. The article is entitled “The Myth of Our Disposability”: Reflections from an Amazon Warehouse Worker on Prime Day. The article has one big virtue: the word "genocide" doesn't appear even once.

I can't argue with her. I have never worked at an Amazon warehouse. It is obviously a very demanding job, and many people don't like it. Though I think some people do, but Ms.Posen is certainly entitled to her opinion. 

Ms. Posen writes,

Amazon created Prime Day, its own commercial holiday, in 2015. The holiday reflects Amazon’s global ascendency and the increasing centrality of the logistics industry in the United States. Other companies, like Walmart, Target, and Temu, have been forced to create their own sales in July to compete with Prime Day. In the United States, there are about 170 million Amazon Prime members, or about half of the country’s population. Amazon Prime is enormously popular, but our warehouse labor is invisibilized—the hours, stress, and life force that this mammoth industry extracts from us and relies on to feed its own rise.

The company made $14.2 billion in profits during Prime this year, an 11 percent increase from last year. That same week, I earned $900 for working a mandatory 60 hours.

At least one correction: Amazon didn't earn $14.2 billion in profits from Prime Day--that was its total revenue. Profit only made up a small fraction of that--probably in the low single digit percent. The rest went to pay utilities, debt service, taxes, and--getting the largest share--labor. Ms. Posen's salary came out of that $14.2 billion. The 11% increase in revenue from last year benefits the workers more than the capitalists.

Then the capitalists don't pay Ms. Posen's salary. It's the 170 million Amazon Prime members who pay her salary (along with the profits, however big or small they are). The video she links to says it all--Ms. Posen, along with her colleagues, provide customers with all those myriad goods and services, and add so much convenience and joy to the world that we should be forever grateful.

I know I am. I use Amazon Prime once or twice per week. In my old age going to the store isn't as easy as it used to be. I pay the $140 annual fee along with for all the goods that are delivered. Some of that payment accrues to Ms. Polen--and she deserves every penny! I don't begrudge her a cent.

If her pay is too low, don't blame Mr. Bezos. Blame people like me. We consumers, we're fickle. A small price increase will send us to Walmart or some other competitor. Amazon's revenue will go down, and take Ms. Posen's salary down with it.

Ms. Posen, who works very hard at an honest job, has a right to complain. I'll consider paying more for the dish detergent I buy.

Further Reading:

• Cozzarelli on Chicago's Mayor Race
• Academic Workers on the Rampage
• Left Voice and the SWP

Malik Miah Defends Harvard

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claudine_Gay

Malik Miah--a longtime and honorable socialist, formerly a comrade of mine in the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), and now a leader in the Solidarity movement--astonishingly rises to the defense of elite education in an article entitled Targeting Diversity, Equity & Inclusion in Higher Education. The piece is a rousing defense of former Harvard president Claudine Gay, and by extension all who supported her: students, faculty and the Harvard Corporation Board.

Harvard (along with a couple dozen other institutions) are tasked with educating elite students. For example, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg both attended Harvard, admitted on the basis of their near perfect SAT scores. Educating elite students is, of course, precisely the opposite of championing equity. Equity and Harvard are like oil and water--and that is what makes Mr. Miah's defense of Harvard so mysterious.

It is a conceit among my Trotskyist friends--perhaps not often openly stated--that anybody could excel at Harvard if only they were given a chance. William F. Buckley famously said “I am obliged to confess I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.” My former comrades--I think including Malik Miah--will likely agree with that, and insist that there is no intelligence or aptitude difference between Harvard faculty and students, and a random collection of people chosen from the phone book. Further, the latter are more likely to represent the working class.

Of course it's not true, and if Harvard genuinely thought it was, then they would have to go out of business. Nevertheless, in deference to the American public's egalitarian impulse, they pretend it's true, and so they go to great lengths to admit a few lower class students and to hire a Black woman as president.

It's all a virtue-signaling scam. I wish Harvard would stick to educating the elite as measured, eg, by test scores.

Apparently Mr. Miah buys the charade. He truly believes that Claudine Gay represents progress in Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in some meaningful way. And this despite Ms. Gay being woefully unqualified to be a college president at all, especially at Harvard. Let me count the ways.

The main job of a college president--especially at a private school--is to raise money. This can be done by soliciting donations, recruiting tuition-paying students, scamming the federal Student Loan program, recruiting students from petrostates who pay full, unsubsidized rates, etc. A president who can't meet fundraising expectations will not be long employed. Ms. Gay has 1) deeply alienated a large group of donors, who have vowed to never give Harvard another penny as long as she's in office, and 2) presided over a 17% drop in applications for early admission.

Any president of any skin color would be gone if they'd failed so miserably. (At my former campus, when the admissions' office failed to recruit enough students for the Fall semester, the president was unceremoniously fired.)

Then she got caught plagiarizing. Personally, I don't think this is such a big deal, and if one fires all college faculty who ever plagiarized anything, you probably wouldn't have many faculty left. Beyond which, with so much written on the web, it's hard to distinguish between purposeful plagiarism and coincidence.

But Harvard, in particular, makes a big, huge deal about plagiarism, and having its president caught in the act is embarrassing. Though I think this is more an excuse to fire her than an actual cause.

Finally, Ms. Gay is not much of a scholar. She has published only 11 papers and not a single book. No white male would get a job at Harvard even as janitor with such a weak publication record. She is not qualified to serve on the Harvard faculty.

Mr. Miah will claim this is just a plot against Black women, or an exercise in "white supremacy." Of course he's wrong. There are plenty of Black college presidents, and many of them successful on the measures I've just outlined. Let me mention Shirley Ann Jackson, first African-American woman to earn a doctorate from MIT, who served as president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute from 1999 to 2022. "Jackson has helped raise over $1 billion in donations for philanthropic causes." Ms. Jackson was frequently criticized, mostly for being the highest paid college president in the country. But nobody ever accused her of being a diversity hire.

Beyond issues posed by President Gay, there are some issues in higher education generally. In Mr. Miah's telling, these are all the result of perfidious attacks by a certain Christopher Rufo. He writes (quoting Mr. Rufo),

The far right is open about its objectives. Christopher F. Rufo, the leader of the racist mob that chased after Gay, said:

“We launched the Claudine Gay plagiarism story from the Right,” he stated on X — formerly Twitter — on Dec. 19. “The next step is to smuggle it into the media apparatus of the Left, legitimizing the narrative to center-left actors who have the power to topple her. Then squeeze.”

This is a replication of his earlier campaigns to turn “critical race theory” (CRT) and “diversity, equity and inclusion” programs (DEI) into dog whistles for the reactionary Republican voting bloc.

Mr. Miah is generous with the insults. In particular, I wonder why everybody who disagrees with him is automatically a "racist?" Surely there are other, more important, issues facing higher ed than "racism," eg, money and mission. I don't know what a "dog whistle" is. Whatever it is, Mr. Miah's ears are much more finely attuned than mine--or any dog's.

Then it's not just Harvard that has a problem with “diversity, equity and inclusion.” The purpose of higher ed is to give its students a leg up on life--to make them better qualified for employment and to earn them more money and a higher status. Thus higher ed is all about maximizing inequity, that is separating their graduates from the hoi polloi. This seems built into the very nature of the enterprise, and not because of anything Mr. Rufo does.

Higher ed is as much or more about status transfer as wealth transfer. Wealth is easy--everybody can get rich at the same time. If Mr. Miah learns how to build a better mousetrap, then not only will he make more money, but I, a consumer, will benefit from having better mousetraps.

Status, on the other hand, is a zero-sum game. My status can't go up without Mr. Miah's status going down, and vice versa. It's ultimately a pecking order. When universities try to transfer status from one group to another, they're definitely gonna get pushback from those whose status is going down. For whatever reason--Mr. Miah probably knows why better than I do--higher ed today is all-in on raising the status of Black and gay people, and then to a much lesser extent, women. People who are not included (blue-collar folks, Asians, Jews) needless to say feel dissed. It's finally reached a boiling point; Blacks and gays have way higher status in higher ed than any other group.

This isn't the fault of Christopher Rufo.

So I don't know why Mr. Miah champions higher ed. It is probably the most reactionary institution in America today. Diversity, equity and inclusion are precisely not on higher education's agenda--and they never can be. 

Further Reading:

• Left Voice and the Intifada
• The Professors' Congress: The International Situation
• "Pedagogy of the Oppressed"

Professor Wants to Shut Down CUNY

The professor in question is James Dennis Hoff, associate professor of English at Borough of Manhattan Community College, part of the City University of New York (CUNY). His title suggests he has tenure, and from this webpage we conclude that his salary is in the $70K - $80K range. Especially if he lives in a dual-earner household, this is a solidly middle class income, even in New York City, where the median salary is about $60K.

Professor Hoff should consider himself very lucky to have a tenured job in an English department at such a high salary. From the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2019,

The news was grim. Columbia University’s English department had failed to place a single current Ph.D. candidate into a tenure-track job this year. And 19 new doctoral students had accepted admission into the program, raising questions about why the cohort is so large when the job prospects aren’t plentiful.

Yet despite that, Professor Hoff is all in on making the problem even worse. In an article for Left Voice entitled Rekindling the Militant Spirit of CUNY’s Past, he writes (emphasis mine)

Mayor Eric Adams has announced an austerity budget that includes significant cuts to the City University of New York among other city agencies. In order to defeat these cuts, students, faculty, and other workers across the city must unite our struggles and be prepared to shut the university down.

CUNY employs over 40,000 people, and Professor Hoff's plan would put them all instantly out of work, potentially deprived of a paycheck and benefits for an indefinite period. This seems hopelessly counterproductive, rather like the child who threatens to hold his breath until his mother concedes on the candy bar.

The cause of our friend's temper tantrum is because (link in original)

This year, the university is once again facing a series of potentially devastating cuts that will only make the situation worse. While the latest New York State budget provided some additional funding to CUNY (still far less than is needed), New York City Mayor, Eric Adams has threatened to shrink the city’s contribution to the university’s budget by more than $68 million and is asking colleges to make plans to cut their spending by five or six percent next year.

The NYT article he links to presents data different than Mr. Hoff cites. I can't account for the discrepancy. From the NYT:

The message, delivered in a letter from the budget director, Jacques Jiha, directed the leaders of nearly every city agency, including the Police Department, to cut their budgets by 4 percent for the coming fiscal year, which begins in July. Only the Department of Education and the City University of New York will be subject to smaller cuts of 3 percent.

What the professor doesn't mention is that CUNY enrollments declined overall by 20% since 2018, while the community college enrollments dropped by 30%. Obviously the institution has to downsize--even the otherwise irrational Professor Hoff needs to admit as much.

A second flaw in Mr. Hoff's argument is he never really tells us who he wants to strike against. He proposes multiple targets, none of which are very convincing. He writes,

Winning such a strike, however, will require more than just faculty and staff walking out of their classrooms and offices. CUNY labor is important for the social reproduction of the city’s workforce, but, unlike K-12 teachers, without whom huge portions of the entire workforce must stay home for lack of childcare, the immediate impacts of a strike at CUNY would likely be insufficient to force the hands of the CUNY administration or the state. In order to win such a struggle, the union will need allies.

Here he suggests that the strike is against "the administration" and/or "the state." Neither of these are strike-worthy. The administration suckles from the same teat as the faculty, and their incentives are exactly the same as the faculty. The difference is that, unlike Professor Hoff, they are precarious workers--none of them have tenure as administrators, and beyond top management they don't have tenure as faculty, either. For this reason they are much more sensitive about what their bosses think about them, and of necessity have both feet planted squarely in reality. The administration is not the enemy.

It's equally bizarre to think he's striking against "the state," where Democrats are totally in charge. The Dems see the teachers' unions in general, and the professors' union specifically, as tight allies, with money flowing generously in both directions. Mayor Adams himself promises a carve-out for CUNY, cutting their budget by only 3% instead of 4%. More, New York state is even raising CUNY's budget! Democratic politicians' self-interest is nearly perfectly aligned with the unions, so to cast them as a strike-worthy enemy is fanciful.

Here is what is going to happen. CUNY enrollment is down by 10% over the past year, and 20% since 2018. Therefore there needs to be a cut in personnel--which will happen over time. The CUNY budget is being cut by 3% (according to the Mayor), and even less than that if increases in state funding are included. If staffing over time has to shrink by 10%, and there is only a 3% cut in the budget, that leaves as much as 7% that can be redistributed to the remaining faculty in the form of raises. That's without raising taxes or calling for a special legislative session to completely rejigger the budget.

That's how it will play out, but it can be done the hard way or the easy way. The hard way is for the faculty to take Mr. Hoff's suggestion and go on strike, complete with the massive disruption and missed paychecks that would entail. Or one can just agree to it through some kind of (Kabuki) negotiation--little fuss and no muss. You'll end up with the same result either way.

Professor Hoff hints at a third solution, writing (link in original)

Like all of the reduced spending in Adams’ proposed budget (and there is a lot), he is blaming these cuts on the cost of helping integrate a wave of new immigrants; but in a city that is continually cited as the wealthiest in the world, there is more than enough money available for improved public services, increased wages for all public workers, and aid for new immigrants.

In other words, instead of striking against the administration or the state, CUNY faculty really need to stick it to those millionaires and billionaires--they are the strike-worthy targets. Of course one can't really strike against them. They depend on CUNY for almost nothing--and they already pay a hugely disproportionate share of the cost. The top 200,000 of the state's taxpayers pay 56.6% of all income taxes. In 2021 there were 84,366 filers who earned at least a million dollars--and they alone paid 48.5% of New York's income taxes. The richest 200 taxpayers alone pay 9.5% of all New York's income taxes! If they were to move out of state, CUNY and all public services would be royally screwed. They stay partly because they feel sorry for the likes of Professor Hoff--who shouldn't bite the hand that feeds him. (Source for above data)

What Professor Hoff and his Hoff-like friends in the city council and state legislature never remember is that those millionaires and billionaires earn their fortunes by providing useful goods and services to many millions of consumers across the country and around the world. Unlike Professor Hoff, who provides nothing of much value to anybody.

Further Reading:

• Academic Workers on the Rampage
• Lost in the Amazon
• Teachers Can't Teach

Oppression!

My Trotskyist friends are big on oppression. 

Using The Militant's search bar for "oppression" yields 398 hits since 2018.  A similar search on the Left Voice website generates 109 pages of hits, each citing 10 incidences of the word--or nearly 1100 hits since 2017. My friends at Socialist Action don't give me a numerical count, but the first page yields 20 hits, and I don't know how many pages there are. The comrades at Worker's Voice also don't do a tally for me, but I counted 300 hits before I got tired of scrolling.

They're obsessed with the oppressed.

As a retired faculty member at a regional college, I have definitely been a victim of oppression. My salary was too low, my office was too small, my research contributions weren't properly recognized, and I had to spend twelve (12) hours per week in the classroom teaching! Oh the misery, the humiliation! No wonder I retired.

Of course my oppression is nothing compared to that of one of my colleagues who is triply oppressed--despite her similar status as a full professor. She's female, she's a POC (person of color in today's terminology, though her skin tone is indistinguishable from mine), and she's queer (formerly a synonym for weirdo). Her oppression is somehow three times worse than anything I've ever suffered, and accordingly she feels triply more sorry for herself than I ever did. As a white male, I'm supposed to feel sorry for her, too, and to hang my head in remorseful guilt.

She likely attributes her oppression to being minoritized and marginalized. I'm not sure what those words actually mean, but I think she does that to herself. She's the author of her own problems.

Marxists believe oppression stems from the theft of surplus value from workers. In this view workers receive a wage (which is determined by the market), but which is always less than the true value of their work, as supposedly determined by the labor theory of value. The difference between this theoretical value and the wage is the surplus unjustly extracted by capitalists and is perceived as oppression.

Michael Roberts gets into the weeds how surplus value is calculated here. The fundamental formula is

Marx's original equation for Rate of Profit (P) is

where s is the surplus value (i.e., what most people would call "profit), c is the total capital stock, and v is the total cost of labor. This is intended to be measured for the entire economy--not just for any individual company.

Mr. Roberts has a very hard time estimating these quantities since Marx's definitions don't match the way the terms are currently used or quantities tabulated. E.g., Marx refers to v as the variable capital, as opposed to fixed capital represented by c, but in modern terms it roughly means total wages.  More, the rate of profit is to be calculated only for the global economy as a whole--for which it is nigh impossible to collect data. It is meaningless to apply the formula to an individual firm.

In a word, the formula is useless, which is why nobody besides Mr. Roberts and a few of his friends bother to try to calculate it.

But Mr. Roberts does say that

The bottom line of the rate of profit formula should be restricted to the capitalist sector and not include public sector or residential housing capital.

Since both I and my POC colleague worked for the public/non-profit sector, we contributed nothing to the productive economy and therefore our salaries should not be included in any calculation of surplus value. In other words, nobody makes a profit off of our labor. We are NOT oppressed--not even a little bit. It doesn't matter what our skin color is or how small our offices are.

As stated, the Marxian concept of surplus value is valid only for the global economy as a whole--it can't be used for any individual firm, much less for a particular worker. Based on Marxism, it's impossible to say that the Walmart worker is more oppressed than, say, the CEO of Citibank (who is, ultimately, merely an employee of the company, albeit a very well compensated one). So while we know that public employees are not oppressed at all, we can only speculate about the oppression of actual workers.

Still, Marxian ambiguity notwithstanding, I'll suggest that the degree of oppression depends on the size of one's wage. That is, the surplus value that a capitalist can withhold from a low wage worker is less than what he can obtain from a high wage worker. So if the unemployed are not oppressed at all, then also the minimum wage employee is minimally oppressed. There isn't much value from which to extract any surplus. Accordingly, the CEO of Citibank is way more oppressed than the Walmart worker.

Besides me, other people who aren't oppressed are people who don't have jobs. I've gone from being not oppressed as a college professor to now being not oppressed as retiree living off my savings. The last time I was actually "oppressed" was when I worked as a taxi driver in Chicago 50 years ago--that being the last time I actually created value for anybody. Similarly, unemployed people aren't oppressed, nor are those who have left the workforce for any reason--not just retirement. Homeless people--despite their dire straits--are also not victims of oppression. They're part of the lumpen proletariat, a term which meaning I'd broaden to include the lumpen intelligentsia, e.g., college professors and their ilk.

Such is the topsy-turvy land of Marxist economics.

My Trotskyist friends will argue that I'm taking Marx too literally, and perhaps they're right. This is probably one of the many ways in which Marxist economics doesn't make any sense. If Mr. Roberts' herculean efforts at calculating the rate of profit fails, it's because the task is essentially impossible and the results are meaningless. No company measures its success on the global rate of profit, nor does any worker gauge their well-being on so ill-defined and irrelevant a concept. Even I admit that my career as a professor wasn't completely useless--a few of my students really did learn something. Though I will be the first to admit that I could have spent my time better, and I'd advise anybody who asks not to work for higher education.

My Trotskyist friends have broadened oppression way beyond its Marxian roots. If Marxist economics is hopelessly vague, then modern Trotskyism is a ball of confusion. In their world, not just workers are oppressed, but so are women, POCs (but not all POCS), "queer" people, and trans people. How all those groups fit into any Marxist category is beyond me. I've written about the so-called "oppression" of women here, and found the concept wanting.

I think Trotskyism attracts people who want to feel sorry for themselves. That certainly includes the academic precariat--who have voluntarily chosen their own misery but nevertheless want to blame it on somebody else. It includes much of the LGBTQIA+..., some of whom are mentally ill and probably rightly do feel sorry for themselves.

In summary, I believe the modern Trotskyist version of oppression is simply self-pity, and it's sad that the concept plays such a large role in their newspapers.

Further Reading:

• Academic Workers on the Rampage
• The Harm Reduction Team
• "Pedagogy of the Oppressed"

ChatGPT and Artificial Intelligence

                                    (2100 words long. I have borrowed many ideas from Arnold Kling's substack.)

I've been doing a lot of thinking and reading about ChatGPT (GPT). For those of you living under a rock, GPT represents a major milestone in so-called artificial intelligence (AI). It's free for public use here, though you will need to register with a legit email address. I urge you to try it.

While GPT is the talk of the town on college campuses these days, its intersection with Trotskyism is minimal. For example, I asked GPT to

Give a brief biography of the SWP's Jack Barnes.

It replied

Jack Barnes is a political figure and a longtime leader of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in the United States. He joined the SWP in the 1960s and has been a central leader of the party since the 1970s. Barnes has written extensively on a wide range of political and theoretical topics, and has been a central figure in the SWP's efforts to build a revolutionary socialist movement in the United States. He has also been involved in various international socialist organizations and campaigns. Despite some controversies, Barnes is widely respected within the socialist movement for his commitment to building a revolutionary party and his contributions to socialist theory. 

I learned nothing from this--it's boilerplate bordering on balderdash. I got a better answer when I substituted in "Mary-Alice Waters" for Jack Barnes. I will note that you will likely get a different answer every time you enter a prompt.

Of the blogs on my Beat, the comrades over at Left Voice will probably care the most about GPT. That's because they're mostly college professors or aspire to become so. GPT threatens to upend their business model and their career plans, so I suspect they won't like it. But they most need to take my advice and learn how to use it. Consider this a brief tutorial.

So what is GPT?

Perhaps most important, GPT is not actually "intelligent", artificial or otherwise. It has no consciousness, it isn't creative, and it can only reorganize and spit out what one feeds in to it. It won't, for example, ever replace a journalist's job as it can't interview anybody, or observe what's happening in real time. At the end of the day it's just a large linear algebra processor, in many ways very similar to Google.

So what is different about GPT? I suggest it is analogous to a new graphical user interface (GUI). Point & click is a much easier way to navigate a webpage than typing in text in response to a ">" prompt. Now the point & click computer is not really any more intelligent than the ">" computer (though it probably does have more RAM and a better graphics card), but it really is a whole lot easier to use. Its construction required a whole new way of thinking about software--and so object-oriented programming was born.

A Google search is the analogue to the ">" prompt. You will get a list of links--perhaps thousands of them--and it will be up to you to find the ones most suited for your purpose. Google uses a linear algebra solver based on counting the number of links to any given webpage. So Google scours the web 24/365 to look and see which pages link to what other pages.

On the other hand, if you type a query into GPT (the "point & click" analogue), the computer doesn't do that. Yes, it still has a database of all the world's webpages (or soon will have that database), but it is no longer looking for links. Instead it is searching for words and phrases. Words and phrases that happen more frequently rise to the top, while those of less frequency sink to the bottom. Eg, "the red barn" will occur more often than "the red epistemology," and thus when asked to illustrate "red", GPT will cite "barn" rather than "epistemology." (Example borrowed from somewhere.) It's still a linear algebra machine, but it's now described as a "neural network" and supposedly is "artificial intelligence." Instead, it's just extremely clever software, just as object-oriented was extremely clever software.

But there is an additional twist. GPT can borrow phrases from across the web, and can put them together to make a coherent sentence and paragraph. That is, it has been taught the rules of English grammar, syntax and (to some extent) style. This is natural language processing, and I'm not sure how the computer learns how to do that. But it's not really saying anything original--it is merely piecing together bits of language that it's cribbed off the web.

In the Google world, you got a list of links, hopefully in order of declining relevance. In the GPT world, you get a list of words and phrases put together in paragraph form, constructed by a natural language processor. There is no fundamental difference--GPT isn't any more intelligent than Google and draws from the same dataset. But it organizes the data differently and allows for free form queries, and presents the results in a different format (written paragraphs), just as a GUI alters the input/output of graphical data.

Needless to say, the business most disrupted by GPT is Google, and my impression is that company is now sweating bricks. GPT was designed by OpenAI, which has received $billions in investment from Microsoft, which now proposes to invest billions more. In the search world this gives Microsoft a new killer app--or perhaps it's a Google-killer. Google is responding by accelerating its own investment in AI (an acronym that should be in scare quotes).

So could GPT have written this essay? Right now, No. That's because GPT is, as far as I know, trained only on data current thru 2021. The data I'm drawing from is much more recent than that, so therefore GPT has no access to my sources. But that's a short-term limitation; surely within the next few weeks or months there will be AI that searches the entire web. In that case GPT and I have access to exactly the same information. Or actually, not--for I have only accessed a dozen or so pages, while GPT has looked at billions. GPT knows way more than I do.

So why can't GPT write my essay better than I can? Because my essay reflects my personality just as much as it is about web pages. I come with a prejudice against AI--that is, I don't think it's intelligent, and I doubt it ever will be. Then, as will be apparent later, I have a bias against higher education. These biases (among others) reflect inputs into my essay that GPT will never have access to--and therefore it can't write my essay. It never will be able to. (If I were famous perhaps it could get closer. I can ask GPT to write an essay about inflation in the style of Paul Krugman, and what I'd get will be an imitation of Paul Krugman. Though were I to ask the real Paul Krugman for such an essay, it would likely be very different. But I'm not famous enough for GPT to imitate me.)

It appears that GPT can pass both the Medical Boards and the Bar Exam. Of course a person using Google could also pass those exams, but it would take them a lot longer. By searching for words and phrases rather than links, GPT greatly expedites the search process. It is not because GPT is more intelligent. Nevertheless, GPT is a very important new step in technology--at least as important as the modern graphical user interface. Mr. Kling suggests that GPT is as important as the founding of Netscape in 1994. That sounds about right to me.

If GPT can pass the Boards and the Bar, then it certainly can do a lot of the work that doctors and lawyers now do. Doctors' jobs are likely safer because they have to talk to, look at, and touch their patients. GPT can't do any of that. But once the doctor (or the nurse or PA) has accumulated a list of symptoms, then GPT can probably narrow down the diagnosis pretty quickly, and then also the recommended treatment. While GPT probably won't outright eliminate jobs, it will become an important medical coworker.

Lawyers, on the other hand, are at greater risk. I'll suggest that the work entry level lawyers do today will increasingly be done by GPT. If a legal practice is simply constructing wills and managing estates, I think they may be substantially out of business rather soon. Or at least have many fewer employees.

I read that GPT is an excellent programmer. Mr. Kling suggests that a million Indians, now working in Bangalore writing routine code, will soon be replaced by GPT.

Higher ed is both behind the eight ball and in the catbird seat. If they were smart they'd own GPT. But they're not smart--which is where the eight ball comes in. From lurking on my campus email, it seems the faculty's first response is just to ban the platform and assume all it's good for is cheating. I suspect that will be the go-to opinion of the Left Voice crowd. First, I'm shocked that they think so poorly of their students. Yes, some of them will cheat, but most of them won't. Second, this is a fool's errand--you will never be able to ban GPT. And I don't know why you'd want to (except perhaps on a few specific assignments). GPT will change the way higher ed works in very dramatic ways. I suggest it will make online education much cheaper and more effective. The benefits of a residential college will decline in relative terms. Since GPT will radically change the workplace, it must perforce change what higher ed teaches.

I believe (and have believed for some time now) that educating students in STEM fields is not useful, and I deplore the huge funds that governments and philanthropies are investing in STEM education. Because computers can already do math better than you can. And now GPT can program computers better than you can. GPT can probably do science and engineering better than you can, and learn to design experimental apparatus or an organic synthesis faster and better than any human. Of course there will always be a need for very high-end scientists and engineers--but much less need for the more mediocre sorts educated at smaller, public institutions like where I worked.

College algebra is a nearly useless subject. Calculus is even less useful. Yes, they're beautiful, and people who are interested in those disciplines for their own sake should be encouraged. But to require hundreds of students to take algebra and calculus because they're useful (when they're not) strikes me as not sensible. Calculus probably needs to go the way of Latin.

The careers of the future will not be in STEM. Instead they'll be in the arts and humanities. The scientist and engineer were careers for the 20th Century. Today they're increasingly automated away. The careers of the 21st Century are the artist, musician, storyteller, preacher, counselor, sex worker, nurse, teacher*, comedian, chef, hotelier, etc., along with the all-important skilled trades. Those are where the jobs will be. And those are the jobs that cannot be done any computer, much less GPT.

So how is higher ed in the catbird seat? That's because nobody really knows how to use GPT yet. How does one use the platform effectively? Ethically? How do you cite GPT sources? This is all very unclear, and it seems to me that the best people to work out some answers to those questions might be college faculty. Or, at least, should be if they weren't such ostriches about it. College faculty need to spend a lot of time using GPT, and need to give their students assignments using it, and play around with what "effective and ethical GPT use" actually means. There will certainly be some false starts, but for the most part I think it would be an adventure.

*By "teacher," I don't mean the college professor type who went to grad school and thinks she's smart enough to ban GPT. I mean something like the Bennington College model where the faculty are practicing artists who take a year-long sabbatical from their careers (art, music, theater, creative writing) to mentor young people who want to learn, only to go back to their careers after a year (or two). 

Further Reading:

• Electric Cars
• Book Review: Life After Google
• Future STEM Employment (probably written in 2013)