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Pittsburgh Post-Gazette with the tragic story of the death of a modern day slave (adjunct professor) toiling in the groves of academe.
On Sept. 1, Margaret Mary Vojtko, an adjunct professor who had taught French at DuquesneUniversity for 25 years, passed away at the age of 83. She died as the result of a massive heart attack she suffered two weeks before. As it turned out, I may have been the last person she talked to.
On Aug. 16, I received a call from a very upset Margaret Mary. She told me that she was under an incredible amount of stress. She was receiving radiation therapy for the cancer that had just returned to her, she was living nearly homeless because she could not afford the upkeep on her home, which was literally falling in on itself, and now, she explained, she had received another indignity — a letter from Adult Protective Services telling her that someone had referred her case to them saying that she needed assistance in taking care of herself. The letter said that if she did not meet with the caseworker the following Monday, her case would be turned over to Orphans’ Court.
For a proud professional like Margaret Mary, this was the last straw; she was mortified. She begged me to call Adult Protective Services and tell them to leave her alone, that she could take care of herself and did not need their help. I agreed to. Sadly, a couple of hours later, she was found on her front lawn, unconscious from a heart attack. She never regained consciousness.
Meanwhile, I called Adult Protective Services right after talking to Margaret Mary, and I explained the situation. I said that she had just been let go from her job as a professor at Duquesne, that she was given no severance or retirement benefits, and that the reason she was having trouble taking care of herself was because she was living in extreme poverty. The caseworker paused and asked with incredulity, “She was a professor?” I said yes. The caseworker was shocked; this was not the usual type of person for whom she was called in to help.
Of course, what the caseworker didn’t understand was that Margaret Mary was an adjunct professor, …
… As amazing as it sounds, Margaret Mary, a 25-year professor, was not making ends meet. Even during the best of times, when she was teaching three classes a semester and two during the summer, she was not even clearing $25,000 a year, and she received absolutely no health care benefits. Compare this with the salary of Duquesne’s president, who makes more than $700,000 with full benefits.
Meanwhile, in the past year, her teaching load had been reduced by the university to one class a semester, which meant she was making well below $10,000 a year. With huge out-of-pocket bills from UPMC Mercy for her cancer treatment, Margaret Mary was left in abject penury. She could no longer keep her electricity on in her home, which became uninhabitable during the winter. She therefore took to working at an Eat’n Park at night and then trying to catch some sleep during the day at her office at Duquesne. When this was discovered by the university, the police were called in to eject her from her office. Still, despite her cancer and her poverty, she never missed a day of class. …
Instapundit comments.
Perhaps academics view the business world as cruel and exploitative toward workers because academia is so cruel and exploitative to its own workers. . . .
While slavery exists, The New Republic shows us the luxury for students.
Part of the ritual of returning to college at this time of year used to mean giving up the comforts of home, particularly the cozy private bedroom that is such a staple of American teenage life, and moving into a campus dormitory that was almost architecturally indistinguishable from public housing. Even at elite schools, rooms were the size of jail cells, beds were stacked like cordwood, and amenities consisted of a dresser and a desk. This was considered perfectly normal. Universities, after all, originated as monastic centers.
Plenty of Spartan dormitories still exist, especially at prestigious liberal arts schools that can have their pick of the litter, but they are quickly going the way of the paper textbook. Today’s student accommodations are being built to resemble the kind of apartments you would find in a new urban high-rise. It’s not unusual for a suite in one of these upscale dorms to include individual bedrooms with private baths and kitchens equipped with a full complement of stainless steel appliances—dishwashers and the obligatory granite countertops included. When admissions officers describe “amenities” to incoming students, their list now includes things like flat-screen televisions and tanning salons. At Drexel University, students are lining up for places in a new, privately built dorm designed by Robert A. M. Stern Architects, a firm known for its Hamptons beach houses and a fabulously expensive apartment building on Central Park West. Besides stunning views of the Philadelphia skyline, full-size beds, and some duplex units, its residents will have access to a private gym with a golf-course simulation room and a 30-seat screening room for practicing presentations—or holding Superbowl parties. …
Victor Davis Hanson posts on the decline of college.
For the last 70 years, American higher education was assumed to be the pathway to upward mobility and a rich shared-learning experience. Young Americans for four years took a common core of classes, learned to look at the world dispassionately, and gained the concrete knowledge to make informed arguments logically.
The result was a more skilled workforce and a competent democratic citizenry. That ideal may still be true at our flagship universities, with their enormous endowments and stellar world rankings. Yet most everywhere else, something went terribly wrong with that model. Almost all the old campus protocols are now tragically outdated or antithetical to their original mission.
Tenure — virtual lifelong job security for full-time faculty after six years — was supposed to protect free speech on campus. How, then, did campus ideology become more monotonous than diverse, more intolerant of politically unpopular views than open-minded? Universities have so little job flexibility that campuses cannot fire the incompetent tenured or hire full-time competent newcomers.
The university is often a critic of private enterprise for its supposed absence of fairness and equality. The contemporary campus, however, is far more exploitative. It pays part-time faculty far less for the same work than it pays an aristocratic class of fully tenured professors with the same degrees.
The four-year campus experience is simply vanishing. At the CaliforniaStateUniversity system, the largest university complex in the world, well under 20 percent of students graduate in four years despite massive student aid. Fewer than half graduate in six years. …
Turning out attention to DC, Daniel Henninger writes on the confused president.
… Early in September, President Obama surprised Washington by announcing he would seek a congressional vote of support for taking action against Bashar Assad in Syria. This came after the red line went. In an account of that decision, The Wall Street Journal reported that after taking a 45-minute walk with his chief of staff, Mr. Obama told his staff, “I have a big idea I want to run by you guys.”
After meeting with the president, two significant political figures in Washington expressed public support for his announced plans to act against Assad—House Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor.
The president’s decision to intervene wasn’t popular with the American public or with members of Congress, so the Boehner-Cantor commitment was a big deal. It was a public expression of political support at the moment the president needed all the political support he could get.
A week and a half later, Mr. Obama reversed course. He would not seek congressional approval. Instead it occurred to him that he could negotiate a Syrian chemical-arms reduction agreement with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The merits of that decision aside, ABC’s Jonathan Karl reported that neither Mr. Boehner nor Mr. Cantor got a heads up from the White House on the U-turn toward Russia.
Throw a dart at the names of the other 11 post-war U.S. presidents. Would any of them have hung a Speaker of the House out to dry just before heading into negotiations with that speaker on funding the government, extending the debt ceiling or the future of your legacy achievement—ObamaCare? Barack Obama did. No problem. …
Jennifer Rubin wonders if he is losing it.
As we’ve written over the last few weeks, the president has real, substantive problems in foreign policy and on Obamacare. But that doesn’t mean his problems are only substantive.
In quick succession, the Syria debacle and his frenetically partisan attack on Republicans as the Navy Yard shootings incident was unfolding have gotten the attention and approbation of a large number of usually friendly voices.
On Syria, there has been near uniform dismay among the pundits and foreign policy experts over the president’s unsteady and often confusing response to Syria’s WMD use.
Just as biting, however, was the criticism of his decision to lash out at Republicans in cartoonish terms at the same time as the killing at the Navy Yard. Politico (which is to Washington superficiality what Emily Post is to table manners) sent up the first flare. Soon CNN chimed in. (“Did Obama strike the wrong tone on Monday?”)
Maureen Dowd gnashed her teeth over the misstep: “[J]arringly, the president went ahead with his political attack, briefly addressing the slaughter before moving on to jab Republicans over the corporate tax rate and resistance to Obamacare. . . . It was out of joint, given that the Senate was put into lockdown and the Washington Nationals delayed a night game against the Atlanta Braves, noting on its Web site, ‘Postponed: Tragedy.’” Chuck Todd (who had his own issues after tweeting the incorrect name of the gunman) intoned on Tuesday that the White House “wish they had yesterday back.” Like Dowd, Andrea Mitchell saw a pattern: “It doesn’t seem as though they have got their footing here, first on Syria, now on this.” …
The Economist writes on the West’s humiliation.
IN JULY 1972 Anwar Sadat, president of Egypt, suddenly decided to turf out thousands of Soviet military advisers. Menaced by Egyptian leftists and undervalued by the Kremlin, he calculated that he had more to gain from siding with America. Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s secretary of state, administered some deft diplomacy to broker a ceasefire between Egypt, Syria and Israel in the Yom Kippur war, and American aid duly flooded into Cairo. So did American influence: the Soviet hold over the Middle East never recovered.
The plan to wrest chemical weapons from Syria, shortly to be embodied in a UN resolution, has echoes of that era—except that the modern Metternich is a serial abuser of human rights and occasional op-ed writer on democracy for the New York Times, called Vladimir Putin. Russia, the country he leads, is too frail to regain its place in the Middle East. But this week, a decade after the invasion of Iraq, it suddenly became clear just how far the influence of the West has ebbed. The pity is how few Americans and Europeans seem to care about that.
In Western capitals the sigh of relief over Syria is audible. Barack Obama, while admitting that his diplomacy fell short on “style points”, claims that he got what he wanted. Syria’s president, Bashar Assad, will sign the convention against chemical weapons and get rid of the agents that he used to kill around 1,500 of his own citizens last month (see article). Even better, Russia shares responsibility for enforcing the plan, which could lead to broader co-operation with America, while Syria’s other ally, Iran, is making noises about negotiating with the Great Satan over its own nuclear programme. …
… The West is not on an inexorable slide towards irrelevance. Far from it. America’s economy is recovering, and its gas boom has undermined energy-fuelled autocracies. Dictatorships are getting harder to manage: from Beijing to Riyadh, people have been talking about freedom and the rule of law. It should be a good time to uphold Western values. But when the emerging world’s aspiring democrats seek to topple tyrants, they will remember what happened in Syria. And they won’t put their faith in the West.