The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has proposed that adjuncts should get paid $15,000 per course.

[O]rganizers argue that if you’re teaching a full load of three courses per semester, that comes out to $90,000 in total compensation per year — just the kind of upper-middle-class salary they think people with advanced degrees should be able to expect.

I also teach 3 classes per term, but after 12 years in the business I still don’t get paid $90,000 year. And I have advising, committeework, recruitment, and research expectations on top of the teaching load.

These are folks who think that an advanced degree creates an entitlement, an obligation on others. It doesn’t. And it misunderstands the issue of value.

“It’s not a path to competitiveness to pay knowledge workers bottom-level wages,” says Gary Rhoades, head of the Department of Educational and Policy Studies at the University of Arizona, who has assisted in various adjunct organizing efforts, including the SEIU’s.

This is word salad. Over 20 years ago Paul Krugman pointed out that “Most people who use the term “competitiveness” do so without a second thought.” In Rhoades’ claim, who is in competition with whom, and how does paying adjuncts more than necessary to get qualified ones enhance that competitiveness?

Here’s the ugly truth about adjuncts: there are far too many people willing to be adjuncts for far too many years–their problem is not stingy colleges and universities but the number of other would-be adjuncts competing for the same positions.

What will happen to that number if the pay were to go from around $2500 per class to $15,000 per class? The pool of adjuncts would increase again. People get burned out and quit on adjuncting in part because of the low pay, making room for others to get adjuncting gigs. But if someone can make $60,000/year for teaching 4 classes, instead of $15,000/year for 6 classes (which is not uncommon), they’re not going to clear the field so quickly, and there’s going to be more competition for jobs.

Employing institutions are also going to increase their standards for whom they hire. That guy with the MA and no publications who’s been teaching American Government for us for years? Sorry, we want a PhD with a publication as our adjunct.

And then there’s the question of who pays for this; ultimately it’s going to be the students and/or taxpayers, and they’re not going to get more value for their money. The SEIU doesn’t care about that, though. It’s not their job to care where the money comes from. It’s only their job to gain more dues payers by feeding frustrated academics’ sense of entitlement.

Lain likes bananas. Only so much, though. She enjoys so much of a banana, then she really enjoys giving the rest to the dog and watching us scramble to prevent that from happening.

She likes apples. Only so much, though. She enjoys the first ten bites, and then she enjoys getting another apple.

The end result of all of this being I end up eating a lot more fruit than I used to.

She likes eggs sometimes. Other times, she does not want eggs and is offended at the very notion that I would try to put them in her mouth.

The end result of that being that I eat a fair amount of eggs, too. Smoke’em if you got’em, I guess.

John Sanphillippo advocates “Good Enough Urbanism.”

Keep that anger bottled up, lower your self esteem, hire a narcissist, and seven more counter-intuitive psychological findings.

Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Utah… what’s the difference, really?

According to a new study, assortive mating actually has increased over time.

“We don’t have a marriage crisis in this country because everybody has stopped following the rules. We have a marriage crisis because the rules don’t work.” -Eve Tushnet

MOOCs may be a disappointment by the standards of what their boosters have said, but there still may be gold in them there hills.

The Economist looks at what’s gone wrong with Germany’s energy policy.

Autonomous cars are going to require new kinds of digital mapping. The article discusses Nokia’s HERE software. I left that out of my navigation software review because it wasn’t available. I have tried it since and I wholeheartedly recommend it.

Listen to the brave story of a cow being prepared for slaughter that had other ideas.

Universities are using the holidays for fundraising. My alma mater has never once called or contacted me requesting money. Which on the one hand, is convenient for me. On the other hand, it’s typical of their administrative incompetencies and I want to smack them over the head for it.

Keli Goff makes a progressive case against birthright citizenship, as part of a larger bargain. I’m not in favor if the idea, and it’s not going anywhere, but I hadn’t realized that a couple other countries have recently made that decision.

The curious case of Lawrence Franks, who ditched the US Army and joined the French Foreign Legion.

I am about to do an update of my feeds on the RSS app on my phone. The RSS app* makes updating the feeds a hassle, so it’s worthwhile to add a lot of sites at once rather than adding them as I find them. So before I go into it… are there any sites you recommend? I’m looking for anything from personal to cultural to political blogs.

* – Also, if you do Android, I’m up for hearing about good RSS apps, too. Bonus points if they can use the word “color.”

Hit Coffee is expanding to new locations with some new writers, in case you haven’t noticed.

Malcolm Blue (aka Mr. Blue) joined some time ago, though has only periodically contributed.

This week, James Hanley (formerly of Ordinary Times and presently of Bawdy House Provisions) has joined. Professor Hanley actually used the Trumanverse map in one of his classes.

And hopefully soon, Gabriel Conroy (of Ye Olde Republicke) will also be joining us.

I don’t intend to retreat in my own output, which I will grant has not been as robust as I would like. Life intervenes. So this will be “in addition to” rather than “instead of.”

Via Dustbury and Autoblog, here is a video of a news reporter who doesn’t know how to use an ice scraper:

She takes the correction in really good humor. And in her defense, she apparently made her way up to Washington State by way of Los Angeles, where you don’t have to deal with this sort of thing often.

I can relate. I remember when I first moved to Deseret from Colosse. It’s not that there was never ice in Colosse that needed to be scraped off, but you never needed more than a credit card and taking anything more than a hand-scraper was a waste of automobile interior real estate. Snow? The last time I had seen snow that was still snow when it hit the ground was 1987.

So it was a bit of a shock.

Also, I had to learn quite a bit about these things. Including the ubiquitous design of those scraper-brushes, and how they worked.

Another thing I learned was that below a certain temperature, even cars that are otherwise in good working order won’t start. I remember my shock when I arrived and people would go into the convenience store while leaving their cars running. Back in Colosse, that was asking to get your car stolen, it seemed to me. But people there did it all the time. Was crime really all that non-existent? Not the case, it turned out. It was just that the comparative risk of a car failing to restart versus the less common but more severe stolen car… well, the frequency of the former trumps the severity of the latter.

What I’ve discovered since, I’ve determined, is that the concern over the stolen car is most likely pretty foolish to begin with. It’s just something you only notice when stopping your car and taking the key out of it takes some risks. This goes into a bit about the regional and generational differences in how we think about crime and the risk of crime. A subject for a post at a later date. Right now we’re talking about ice scrapers.

As it turns out, the scraper-brush is almost a perfectly sized broom for Lain to push around the outside deck when she wants to mimic me pushing around the deck broom. It is every bit as cute as you imagine.

Scientific American has a piece on the differing opinions between scientists and the rest of us on various issues (some political, some not).

The biggest gap that I am on the commoner side of things is world population (23 points). After that, it’s offshore drilling (20 points), vaccination requirements (18 points), and fracking (8 points). All of these are subject to nuance, however. It’s possible that on the world population question it could be hashed out over a beer into more agreement than a boolean answer allows for.

So where do y’all fall on the side of the commoner and against those pencilnecks in lab coats?

Modern feminism apparently can’t compete with targeted marketing, as gendered toys are now more common than they were 50 years ago.

Popular Mechanics looks at the hits-and-misses of its long ago, long term predictions about the future.

The gift of coal: Matt Frost has an interesting proposal to reconcile our love for coal with our need to do something about global warming. Sort of.

There may be a universe where time runs backwards.

Joe Carter looks at the implications that an ultrasound-on-a-chip will have for abortion. {More}

Everybody knows that bike helmets reduce bicycle injuries… but maybe they do so by convincing kids not to ride bikes.

Cory Weinberg looks at modular construction in the Bay Area. I’m a fan of modular instruction (our home was so constructed), but it seems more appropriate for places where construction costs, rather than location, are the cost issue.

As air travel becomes easier and cheaper, European sleeper trains are retiring.

Anyone over a certain age probably wishes they could go back in time and invest in Apple in 1976. Turns out, you would have done better with gold.

What happens when you’re an Airbnb guest and your host dies?

In Valentine, Texas, the entire student body (including two girls) is on the basketball team.

According to the Washington Post, women are dyeing their armpit hair. Young people make me glad to have been young a long time ago. (But not too long ago, because 80’s.)

Koalas do not exactly make good house pets, if the tale of GumNut is to be believed.

The Nereid Under Ice vehicle was deployed to find out who eats whom under the ice.

On Friday, we got a visit from a meat seller. As it happens, we’re somewhat interested in bulk meats, and we definitely want a freezer (which they were throwing in), so we let him in.

His sales pitch was solid. I was initially pretty reluctant, but Clancy (who in particular is interested in bulk meats) was a bit more enthusiastic. I want to start doing a lot more cooking, and having a lot of meat around seemed like a pretty good way to encourage me to do so. He almost had a sale.

I remembered Dr Phi’s post on Town & County Foods, however. Clancy asked if he could step outside to give us a few minutes. Which he did. Remembering Dr Phi’s post on Town & County Foods, I was inspired to look up the company online. While the model of this company differed from T&C, there were enough similarities that I wanted to check up on them. It… did not paint a pretty picture.

On the upshot, this was not a fly-by-night operation. A lot of the complaints I saw involved their aggressive sales strategies. There were no items about hidden contracts, which was a primary concern. There were vague comments about how the business did business, but little in the way of specifics.

However, they do have an “F” from the Better Business Bureau. While they have no obligation to be members, that they aren’t and that they failed to respond to any of the complaints against them… well, that doesn’t prove anything, but also doesn’t fill me with confidence. Given the sheer number of complaints out there, they seem to have accepted or resigned themselves to having a pretty negative reputation online. Which means that if things go sideways, they don’t have a reputation that they would particularly like to protect.

We told the salesperson that it wasn’t going to happen. He made some sale-save efforts, but quickly determined that it was a lost cause. It was a very long few minutes while he packed up his meats and went on his way. On the one hand, I felt bad for him because he really probably thought that he had made a sale. And it fell apart due to no mistake of his own, and on account of something there was absolutely nothing he could do without.

On the other hand, he was an unsolicited solicitor. That’s got to come with the business.

Unlike T&C, I don’t know that what they were offering was a bad deal. I was mostly worried about, once having ordered from them, fending off attempt and attempt at re-order. I once had an ongoing issue when I purchased some printer ink that was alledgely “no obligation” that ultimately resulted in my having to tell shipping “please to not accept any packages from these people.” The salesguy said that wasn’t how they operate. Maybe it’s not. But there was enough out there to make it a concern.

[New guy here, by the grace of Will. I teach political science and political economy at a small private college.]

Wisconsin governor Scott Walker has proposed budget cuts for the University of Wisconsin system and suggested that faculty could help balance the budget by teaching an extra class.

In the future, by not having limitations of things like shared governance, they might be able to make savings just by asking faculty and staff to consider teaching one more class a semester.

There are multiple problems with this statement. First, I wonder if Walker is confusing shared governance with unionism, thinking that the elimination of public sector unions in Wisconsin eliminates shared governance at the university? But unionism is about working conditions, whereas shared governance is about the overall organization, operation, procedures and focus of the organization (e.g., the process for proposing new courses or changes to degree requirements). The boundaries between the two are undeniably blurry–at my own school we often have to pause and reflect upon whether the particular issue we want to address is most appropriately dealt with in the Faculty meeting (shared governance) or in the Union meeting (unionism). It’s a bit amusing, since the two bodies almost wholly overlap, but nonetheless the forum matters. And from my non-expert but not wholly ignorant perspective, teaching load is purely a working conditions issue, not a shared governance issue at all.

Second, Walker makes the basic error of assuming people are just reactive, instead of active: that they will just do as the rule tells them to do, instead of finding ways around the rule. (One of my standing rules of policymaking is to make policy for the people you have, not the people you wish you had.) The top researchers especially will be able to avoid this rule, because they are in demand and will be welcomed at other institutions. In 2009 UW-Madison ranked 9th in the country for federal research funds – receiving almost $600 million – and ranked 3rd in the country for most research and development expenditures, at over $1 billion. Damage UW-Madison’s research program by forcing those professor to spend more time teaching, and you’ll damage the reputation of the state’s flagship institution.

And teaching does take time, not just the hours in the classroom. Even for my most well-prepped class, American Government, I normally put in about 1/2 hour of prep for every hour in class. I know the material, but without review I may not remember all the elements of it that I want to address, or my presentation may not be as orderly and coherent. Imagine memorizing a speech, then giving it twice a year–if you could do it well each time without reviewing it again, my hat’s off to you. New courses, or courses I teach only occasionally, require more than 1 hour of prep per hour in class. That greatly cuts into the time available for research, which is one of the primary reasons faculty at teaching-oriented colleges and universities produce less research than those at research-focused universities.

Then there’s the time spent just thinking. On any given day at any given time someone peering into my office might assume I’m just browsing the internet for cat videos, reading for pleasure, or just staring blankly at the walls. But keeping up with developments in my areas of focus takes time. I not only have to read about them, I have to think about them. I’m familiar with faculty (and administrators) who have skimmed a book or research paper, pulled out an idea couched in memorable phrasing, and then proceeded to misapply it because they didn’t really take the time to think about it. (In one memorable case, as a graduate student I pointed out that a professor had misapplied an important idea from a notable economist, to which he replied, “I guess I ought to read that paper.”)

Thinking takes up just as much time when trying to write a research paper, or any document really. My department completed our program review document last week. On Tuesday I spent most of the day just writing the one page executive summary. (Have you ever tried summarizing a 100 page document in one page, while emphasizing your own tremendous awesomeness and how any imperfections could be solved easily if somebody outside your department would do the right thing while not offending that person who could do that right thing by making it sound like it’s their fault?) On Friday I spent 5 hours reviewing and editing the final draft. And today, Sunday, I am working on a new assignment for my American Government class that will require them to work with real data, which requires long pauses in writing while I think about how to make the directions clear to non-data oriented students.

Teach another class? I’ve actually done a fair amount of that lately, kinda sorta. That is, I’ve taught some overloads lately, but they involve 1/2 courses where I co-teach with someone else, so in a sense I’m only developing 1/4 of a course. It still takes time, though.

This is not to say “pity us poor college profs.” It’s not a bad gig. I worked a lot harder, at much greater personal risk, and for much less pay as a bike messenger. One of my own profs had previously worked at a nitroglycerine factory, until the old guys there–who all had occupational-induced emphysema–told him to get out and go to college so he didn’t end up like them. It’s just to say that the job takes time; that classroom-hours are not synonymous with workload; and that Walker can only get what he wants by damaging the impressive reputation of UW-Madison and thereby diminishing the reputation of the state as a whole.

[Disclosure: I do not teach in Wisconsin or at a public college/university.]