Why I Left Academia

This past fall, I left academia. I walked away from a tenured position, and I took a job as a researcher with the Illinois State Board of Education. The reason is straightforward enough: my family all live in Southwest Michigan, and my wife's family all live in Central Indiana so taking a job in Chicago meant that we could live much, much closer to all of them. We've already enjoyed daytrips and lots of visitors.

I want to offer a few clarifications. First, I didn't change careers because I had become disillusioned with higher education. I loved being a professor, and I might do it again some day (if possible). Second, I didn't leave my job because of my employer--mostly. My colleagues at Georgia College were wonderful. I had several complaints about the local administrators, but generally, they were all doing their best. The University System of Georgia and the State of Georgia, on the other hand, suffered from many, many problems. I won't delineate them here, but suffice to say, the USG and the state are victims of their own politics. Still, this, by itself, was not enough to cause my exit. Finally, we didn't move because we didn't like Georgia. Milledgeville was a nice place to work, and we loved living in Athens. We will miss Athen's culture and all of the friends that we made in Georgia. Commuting nine hours a week wasn't sustainable, though, especially as the kids are getting older and more involved in extracurriculars. (Oh, the irony of moving to a major metropolitan area from a rural area to cut down on the commute!)

The transition was very difficult, but we are finally feeling settled and are happy. More updates to come.

Precarity and Exploitation in Relation to Prestige and Celebrity

David Arditi has a new book coming out that looks at how unscripted (i.e. "reality") shows, like The Voice, exploit musicians who are particularly vulnerable because of their uniquely precarious situation. You can see his ASA presentation on the topic here.

His work inspired a question for me: Why do we tolerate such extreme precarity in a field (i.e. music) that is so beloved? Shouldn't we want to protect cultural producers more than typical workers?

I raised this question in a senior-level course recently, and a student pointed out the similarity in the precarity and exploitation of minor league baseball players. Musicians and professional athletes do indeed hold a unique role for us with celebrity and prestige. Could this be an explanation and not a paradox?

Hypothesis: We are more tolerant/ignorant of the precarity and exploitation of workers in fields that are more prestigious and celebrated.

Anyway, it seems like an interesting area for research.

First Day Teaching in a Pandemic

Yesterday was my first day back in person at Georgia College. Here are some observations/thoughts:

• I went in deeply anxious. I think administrators and other people in authority have failed to adequately consider the psychological and emotional effects of the return for staff, students, and faculty.
• I will say that I was pleasantly surprised by the signage, organization, and facility arrangements. Things are far from ideal or safe, but they exceeded my expectations. There are still many problems to solve, though (e.g. How do I use the overhead projector with a big, plastic screen in the way?).
• The administration promised us face shields several weeks ago if we requested them, but as of yesterday, they were not available. I had heard, though, that University System of Georgia administrators were patting themselves on the back for this availability to the press.
• Whenever outside of my office, I wore a mask and a face shield (purchased with my own money). I was surprised how winded I became from lecturing in the mask, especially since I am a relatively fit and healthy person. By the end of the day, I felt like I was starting to acclimate to it, but it was quite difficult. If my tolerance doesn't improve, I will be forced to regularly dismiss classes early.
• I was pleasantly surprised by how compliant the students were with the social-distancing and mask requirements. I didn't see any major or flagrant deviance. I did have to remind a couple students in class that masks need to cover their noses as well as their mouths, though.
• The first day of the fall semester is always somewhat stressful, but this was by far the most exhausting day I have experienced in my 16 years of teaching.
• I continue to hear disturbing stories from my colleagues who live in Milledgeville (I commute) about how students, particularly Greeks, are regularly ignoring social-distancing and mask recommendations and requirements both on and off campus. This bodes poorly for everyone's wellbeing.

Come be my boss!

The Government and Sociology Department is hiring a new chair.

Robots, Men, Women, and Nursing

This is good and worth watching:



However, I still think it leaves out a few important sociological findings:

• Glass Ceiling
• Even as women aspire to promotions and pay increases and those benefits appear accessible, there are structural barriers that hinder most women's ability to reach them.
• Think about the different way we treat parents. Women are often not promoted because it is assumed that they will take maternity leave at some time. Even if it is assumed most men will have children during their career, it is not assumed that they will take leave, or at least not more than a few days.
• Glass Escalator
• Men who do work in traditionally feminine fields are often promoted out of the day-to-day work of those fields. 
• Think about male kindergarten teachers. Many parents are uncomfortable with men teaching their kids at such a young age. Administrators can't fire these men. Instead, they promote them out of the classroom, making them principles. Of course, such promotions come with better pay, which could have gone to a woman but now is more likely to go to a man.
• If nurses were paid better, men would be more likely to enter the field, and as men enter fields, those fields tend to offer better pay.

Vacation Is for Unicorns

Only in America could you run this ad (which for some reason plays twice in this link, sorry):



Essentially everywhere else in the advanced, industrialized world, workers are guaranteed four weeks of paid vacation on top of holidays. The idea that two weeks is "standard" and that demanding three weeks somehow makes one a nonstandard unicorn would be comical if it weren't downright depressing. What's more are the inevitable pressures not to actually use those vacation days.

Owning My Summer

I did a bit of an experiment over the summer, and as I'm ready to get back into the fall routine next week, I thought I'd share. Like most faculty, I am on a 10-month appointment. That means that I am technically only employed by the college between August and May. I am on my own for June and July. Traditionally, academics have used the summer to do research. I find this arrangement highly problematic[1]. Regardless, there is an administrative creep, whereby students, colleagues, and administrators increasingly expect faculty to be responsive during the summer[2]. To hedge this a bit, I set up the following automatic reply from my work email account:

I am away from campus conducting research and will only be checking email sporadically until August.

Indeed, I did my best to only check my work email once a week. I'll admit that I didn't always hold to this goal, though. I was quite adamant, however, about not checking email during the two weeks during which I was on vacation with my family. Sadly, people continue to send email, whether I'm checking it or not, and I often had dozens of emails waiting for me on the days when I did check.

Overall, my approach, the auto-reply and checking email infrequently, was pretty successful. I will do it again next summer for sure. I made a lot of progress with my new research project, though not as much as I had hoped. More importantly, I spent a lot of time with my daughter and wife. Starting next week, I'll get back to the grind. I will not be checking my work email on the weekends, though.

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[1] The roots of this, I believe, are more political than anything. John and Jane Q. Public think that professors are teachers and are not fully informed about the research and service requirements of the job. Since teaching generally happens between August and May, those are the months during which, from that uninformed perspective, professors are working, and paying them during the summer when most are not teaching is unjustifiable. While it's true that most of us are actually paid a salary over those ten months that amounts to a fair 12-month salary, the symbolism is important: what I do is neither understood nor valued. I have found that the psychological effects of this are that I am not as motivated during June and July as I might otherwise be if my employer signalled to me that my productivity during that 17% of the year is as valuable as my productivity during the other 83%. That may sound almost adolescent, but I would argue that it is only human.

[2] There is a quote that the interwebs attribute to Bob Carter that goes, "Poor planning on your part does not necessitate an emergency on mine." I love this sentiment, but I think it might be a bit simplistic. Like us, administrators have their bosses, too, so the "poor planning" is possibly more institutional or organizational than it is a personal failing. The problem is created not by any given administrator but by the bureaucratic system of administration itself in which it is literally people's jobs to create work for others and to delegate tasks to subordinates. Because capitalism. Thanks, Obama.

Death by a Million Paper Cuts

Without getting into the details, I have enjoyed a window recently into the root of the tensions between faculty and administration. The gist is that some administrators wanted to add another bureaucratic requirement for student midterm grade reporting. I think, to their mind, it was a simple request and would take faculty only an extra half an hour or so a semester to do. The problem, though, is that we are asked to do many, many, many simple and brief things like this in the course of our work. It is no one thing that is necessarily unreasonable; it is the sum total of all the little things that become unreasonable together. It's death by a million paper cuts. For administrators, this is their job, but faculty are supposed to teach and research and serve. These bureaucratic requirements are intrusions on or distractions from, not the substance of, our work.

Kids Will Be the Answer in a Post-work World

There seems to be a lot of discussion about post-work society recently. In particular, there is disagreement about how things will play out as robots increasingly displace manual and service laborers and, then, as AI's one day challenge the seemingly-safe jobs of us more heady professionals. There are both pessimistic and optimistic takes on this, I think neatly summarized by this cartoon:

SOURCE

Clearly, we are currently living in the left cell (or at least are well on our way down that path), and while I think that the right cell should most definitely be our goal, we have a lot of problems to overcome before we get there.

Foremost among these problems is the cultural. We tend to value work as an ends instead of as a means. Our Protestant Ethic tells us that hard work is a reward in and of itself, that work builds character, and that idleness is dangerous. We collectively forgot that the reason we work was to provide ourselves with the resources to do life, and that life was about recreation and creativity and leisure and social interaction. The Industrial Revolution socialized us to equate life with work. I'm reminded of this every semester when I do this exercise with my students. When confronted with the prospect of never having to work for the rest of their lives, several students inevitably say that they would be bored, which is the direct result of having fully internalized the value that life is about busyness (i.e. business) while discarding the very nature of life itself.

To move from the left cell to the right, we would likely need to enact a form of basic income. Think about it this way: as humans are needed less and less to make stuff and do things, the overwhelming majority of humans, who rely on work to make the money necessary to survive and do life, will be left without access to money at all. Only those who own the robots (i.e. the means of production) could profit economically, but even they will lose their money since there will be no one left who is capable of buying their goods or services. Instead, we would need a new way to distribute money apart from labor, and one way to do this is to redistribute the profit exploited from the robots to the unemployed (i.e. everyone), which is in practice the promise of a universal income guaranteed to be above real poverty.

To overcome the cultural baggage that will inevitably impede a transition to an enjoyable post-work world, however, we need new beliefs, values, and behaviors. This doesn't require reinventing the wheel as we have already rationalized the exit of one very large demographic from the labor force: children. Before the Industrial Revolution and the Victorian Era, childhood as we know it did not exist. We had to invent it as a way to keep kids from competing with adults in the unskilled labor force. I posted before about how this is reflected in historical changes in the depictions of children:

In the agrarian world, kids are simply little adults; with the Victorians, kids become vulnerable, special, and protected. Children are suddenly afforded great latitude to play, explore, and learn. They are gifted a broad freedom from worry and responsibility. Whereas kids used to be assets, essentially another set of hands to work the land, kids become liabilities who are incapable of even the most basic self-care with the onset of modern capitalism. It's worth reminding ourselves how profound this transition was. We completely redefined an entire segment of the human lifecourse. To address the cultural transition from work to post-work, we could simply apply the same principles we attached to childhood universally to all people. "Hard work is a reward in and of itself?" "Work builds character?" "Idleness is dangerous?" To the contrary, hard work is dangerous, risky, and exploitative. Work destroys human character, and idleness is necessary to living a good life. The lessons of those Victorians would be invaluable here.

But what about my students and their fear of boredom. I generally challenge them in this assertion by telling them about how I would live in a post-work world. I am lucky in that I actually do enjoy my current job. Being a professor is work, and there is much about it that I would opt out of if given the chance (e.g. "service," especially committee work), but I would probably still want to educate young adults about sociology, even if I didn't teach as many courses as frequently as I'm currently required. (I always have to remind students that they could still do their "jobs" in a post-work world if they found it rewarding; they just might not get paid to do it.) I would most definitely write, perform, and record a lot more music! What keeps me from doing this now is that my job is a time-suck and that I couldn't support my family doing it as a career. I would spend a lot more time with my daughter and wife. I would blog more. I would travel--widely. I would ride my bike more. Far short of giving my life meaning, my career constrains my life. I would welcome the ability to do more life.

Addendum to the Post-work Kids-thing

I just posted about how childhood offers a potential answer to the inevitable problem of organizing a world in which work is no longer required of humans. I think a major problem with such a world, though, involves an unanticipated issue with basic income. Basic income is often compared to minimum wage in that both set a basement: everyone makes at least this much. Minimum wage, however, did not do away with inequality. Sure, in theory, it reduces extreme poverty, but even if we raised the minimum wage to a living wage, people would still aspire to higher incomes. In other words, if McDonalds promised to pay me $25,000/year, I still wouldn't want to work there, even if the stress and responsibility of working there is considerably less than at my current job. I probably wouldn't even consider it for $52,000/year. The same is likely to be true of a basic income. People will stratify above and beyond the basic income with additional labor if allowed to do elective paid labor. For that reason, it's probably worth considering a legal prohibition against all paid labor attached to any proposal for basic income.

The Workers at Biltmore Wished He'd Built Less

I visited the Biltmore Estate with my family over my recent Fall Break. To be honest, I was not looking forward to it, but it ended up being the highlight of the weekend--and that's saying quite a bit since I got to visit a great brewery and wander around downtown Asheville.

Biltmore: A Ridiculously Big House

To those who don't know, Biltmore was built c. 1890 as a rural, mountain retreat by George Vanderbilt, grandson of the railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt. It was opened to the public after the family struggled following the Great Depression. It stands as a reminder of the outsized footprint of American industrialists during the Gilded Age.

We paid to take a tour of the building (and then paid again to listen to a recording of a tour guide). I found myself angered by the way that the tour whitewashed what were most certainly complicated relations between the servants who build and maintained the estate and the family who lived, occasionally, on the property. First was a rosy story about a young servant who dropped a service tray during a dinner party. As told, the story is that she expected to be reprimanded by Mr. Vanderbilt, but instead, he helped her to pick up the mess and even checked in on her for the rest of her life, for which she was eternally grateful. A second example came in the basement of the building, where we learned that several generations of servants and their children were happy to live on the property and that the servants were happy to work there because they received New York wages in North Carolina, which we are to assume were considerably higher.

Both of the stories served to mask the immediate exploitation that was no doubt the foundational story of the workers at Biltmore and their employer and was indeed the very foundation of the immense wealth accumulated by families like the Vanderbilts during the Industrial Revolution. The elites extracted profit from the labor of the poor.

I have noticed this type of whitewashing before as something typical of many historic sites, oftentimes more literally than figuratively. I went to college on the grounds of an estate that most certainly was built and serviced by slaves, though there was rarely, if ever, a mention of this history. I have worked for many years now in the Deep South, visiting many historic locations where slaves and slavery are given only a passing reference, at best. I remember learning an important lesson at a museum as a child, where, to their immense credit, they openly discuss the lamentable fact that elite historic sites tend to survive because they are built with more durable materials and methods, while common historic sites inevitably disappear due to the ravages of time and inattention.

The literally unbelievable stories proferred by the likes of the Biltmore Estate unwittingly do violence to the historic poor and, by extension, the contemporary poor by erasing or even replacing their stories. The only thing more damaging than rendering a group invisible is recasting them as smiling. The Vanderbilts received their earthly rewards; their servants have not yet. We rewrite history to maintain the myth of "Great Men," but I think, we also rewrite the narratives so as not to make ourselves uncomfortable, to not confront our own failings. We'd be better served to confront the ambiguity of it all.

Political Economy, Employees, and Consumers: Who Should Own the Corporation?

Privately owned corporations--even those with virtuous corporate cultures and ethics--exist for and are legally bound to making profit for their shareholders. This is generally (though by no means universally) agreed to be problematic for a number of reasons. Here is a quick question that I've been thinking on, though: Is there a practical distinction to be made between consumer-owned cooperatives (CC's)  and employee-owned collectives (EC's)? Good examples of CC's would include credit unions and mutual insurance companies. Good examples of EC's in the U.S. would include Publix and New Belgium Brewing. Though EC's are more democratic, I wonder whether there might be instances in which we might prefer CC's to EC's. To use an example from above, is it better to have a financial institution that is controlled by its employees or by its customers? Would I rather my money work for me or trust that the best interests of the employees are also my best interest?

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Inspired in part by Wilkinson, Richard and Kate Pickett. 2010. The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger. (esp. pp. 252-263) New York: Bloomsbury Press.

Come Work with Me!

My department is hiring! Are you or a student looking for a gig? Check us out!
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Lecturer -Sociology; Non Tenure Track

The Department of Government and Sociology currently offers bachelors degrees in Criminal Justice, Political Science, and Sociology and masters degrees in Criminal Justice and Public Administration. The Department consists of 26 full time faculty and two professional staff members. In addition to serving students through its programs, the Department also focuses on expanding undergraduate research opportunities, community engagement and public policy inquiry. For more information about the department, visit http://www.gcsu.edu/gov/index.htm.

Georgia College is a member institution of the University System of Georgia and is the state’s designated public liberal arts university. A member of the Council of Public Liberal Arts Colleges (COPLAC), Georgia College enrolls approximately 6,600 undergraduate and graduate students and is prominently cited for educational excellence in a number of leading publications. The university’s beautiful and historic campus is located in Milledgeville, which was the 19th century capital of Georgia and is very near the geographic center of the state.

Georgia College is an affirmative action/equal opportunity employer. We are committed to enhancing the diversity of the workforce, student body and curriculum. Candidates who share these commitments are encouraged to apply. Furthermore, the successful candidate must have an interest in teaching in a liberal arts setting and embrace a teacher/scholar model.

Primary Purpose of Position
Successful candidates will be expected to instruct our students in the discipline of sociology at the undergraduate level and will make extensive contributions to core instruction related to the introductory sociology course, in addition to a critical thinking course organized around social problems (Georgia College first year seminar) and other core offerings related to global issues and challenges (Georgia College second year seminar).
Successful candidates are expected to have:
1. understanding of the principles associated with teaching and learning.
3. strong communication skills and successful higher education teaching experience.
4. a developing research agenda.
5. demonstrable ability to work collegiality and effectively with individuals of diverse backgrounds.

In keeping with the University’s mission we especially encourage applicants who will further our goal of cultural, ethnic, racial, and gender diversity.

Click here for the complete posting.

Is Homework a Capitalist Ploy?

Schools can be seen as training grounds for future workers. From this perspective, it's not so much that schools teach students a set of practical skills, like reading or maths, as that they instill an ethic, including things like the ability to effectively manage one's time, to self-discipline, and to use critical (within limits) thinking to solve problems. Skills can be taught with comparative ease, often on-the-job, but employers need workers with more deeply engrained personal predispositions or habits. Schools do some of that skill-teaching stuff but only so much as an exercise in that deeper ethic. For example, we all grow up reading Shakespeare in school, but we don't do so because knowing Macbeth will be of any real import in our careers; instead, reading Shakespeare turns out to be a decent-enough way for us to practice disciplining ourselves to critically engage a text over which we subsequently are evaluated individually. Nobody is asked to give a report on the Scottish play at work, but we are all required (and inevitably evaluated on how effectively we are able) to make sense of texts of our own accord.

This brings me to my critical question about one aspect of primary education. Inasmuch as schools are a way to instill a particular ethic in students, homework, then, is a way of preparing workers to accept that their work demands will intrude on their home lives. It may seem that I am channeling my rebellious adolescent self here ("We don't need no education!"), but this is a bit deeper than a down-with-the-man sentiment. The industrial revolution centralized the means of production, drawing workers away from family-owned/ran farms and workshops in rural areas to factories in urban centers. This created a work-life divide that hadn't really existed before. Work was no longer part of one's role in his family and was no longer done in or near his home. Work was alienated from the sphere of the domestic and familial. In the post-industrial world, however, centralization is increasingly less important. Evidenced by the growth in flex-time schedules and telecommuting, employers are realizing that workers can be equally (and potentially even more) productive outside of the office, freed from regular working hours. This, of course, requires a different ethic. Industrialization demanded that people accept work and home as separate spheres. Post-industrialization demands, instead, that people accept a re-intrusion of work into the home. It is impossible for a manager to ask a worker to finish machining a camshaft over the weekend knowing that the worker does not have access to the proper tools on Saturday and Sunday when the factory doors are locked. It is not only possible but desirable for a manager to ask a worker, invariably at the end of the day on Friday, to "Have this report on my desk by Monday morning." In order for the worker to accept this assignment, though, he has to accept it individually and see it as part of a cultural norm. Having been trained for 12 years in school to accept that some work must be done at home outside of regular hours, he becomes much more amenable to this exploitation.

So, does this mean that homework is bad? I'd say that it depends on one's perspective. To argue that it is bad is (ironically, I would say) to agree with an industrial model of production that bifurcates the world into work and home. If one finds the decentralized post-industrial model of production more agreeable, homework is at worst neutral. Homework can really only be seen as "good" by those who extract profit from workers by convincing them to be exploited.

Empty Nests, Empty Trees, and Empty Forests

Here is something that my wife and I were wondering: are people more geographically mobile today than they were in the past? Specifically, is occupational mobility increasing? Even more particular, assuming increased mobility, what effect does this have on extended family connections, childcare, and child socialization? Surely, researchers are looking at this, no?

Mowing a Path to Graduation

I saw this massive wall-cling poster recently, and it reminded me that, for many students, work is not a choice but a necessity.

Students who need to work in the summer to pay for school end up at a disadvantage because they take longer to complete college than those who don't need to work, delaying graduation, delaying a career, and increasing overall college costs. The sign also makes the assumption (albeit parenthetical) that parents are helping with college costs, an advantage not enjoyed by all students--particularly those who would need to work during the summer. Advertisements that frame summer classes in the language of "choice" do several things. First, they highlight what is likely the shortsightedness of well-intentioned administrators who do not recognize the diversity of students' socioeconomic situations. Second, they hide the fact that students are often structurally constrained. Finally, they alienate working- and lower-class students who are already underrepresented at most four-year institutions.

And don't get me started on the push to online classes.

Friday Music: "Money for Nothing" - Dire Straits (trigger warning)

I give you Dire Straits' (edited version of) "Money for Nothing":



And now, I give you the original, unedited version of the same song (NSfW/trigger warning):



You'll note that the verse that begins around the 1:52 mark of the unedited version includes several uses of the pejorative term "faggot." I don't know the entire history of the song. (Wikipedia has a brief discussion of the controversy.) However, these versions could be A/B'ed in a classroom--with ample warning--to show the changing nature of the acceptability of terminology as well as changing definitions of deviance, both in terms of language and sexual practice/identity. Interestingly, though the F-word declined after its coinage and remained fairly scares mid-century, its use in books seems to have increased since the 1980s.

In addition to the anti-gay and homophobic themes, this song can be used to discuss work, class, and conspicuous consumption.

Stressgate

This recent article has caused quite the stir among academics and has launched countless rebuttals, including this one. I want to go on record as saying that my job is not very stressful. Sure, there are moments--typically predictable--that are more stressful than others (e.g. end-of-semester grading), but by and large, I am privileged to experience a lot less stress than most people. Let me point to a few reasons why I think this is. First, my job is incredibly flexible. Some have incorrectly stated that professors get lots of vacation time. I don't get summers off. For some stupid reason, my employer only pays me 10 months of the year, but I get year-round benefits, am salaried, and am generally expected to be productive during the summer months, even if I am not teaching. In fact, working at a teaching college, summers are my only real time to get research done, research being one of the three criteria by which I am evaluated. All said, though, summers--while not partytime--are mine to determine. Even beyond that, my school year is flexible. For example, I live about 70 miles from campus and only commute three days a week for classes and office hours, working two days a week from home. That's certainly not the same as getting two additional days off every week, but I do have unprecedented discretion with my time.

Even more than that, though, the job prestige enjoyed by professors affords us a class privilege that can mitigate what stress we do experience. Regardless of pay, the autonomy, interpersonal valuation, and, by definition, over-education of professors places us and our families in the upper class. It is similar for most physicians and attorneys. If you are a professor who claims to be middle class, you are deluding yourself.

Let me end with a note on personal ambition. Many, possibly most, professors have a lot of career ambition. We are socialized to be so. Ambition is the self-imposition of stress. Moreover, the valuing of such ambition is uniquely American. It's not enough just to do one's job successfully; one is supposed to give "110%." The hegemony of overwork--even among those who study such things and should know better--is taxing. I will be the first to admit that I actively avoid such stresses. I have done enough to be on track for tenure but am careful to avoid stretching myself too thin. Many would classify that as a "mediocre" mindset (though, I would dispute that). Even that word, however, becomes evidence of my point. "Mediocre" has not always carried a negative connotation. It originally just mean "ordinary" or "in the middle." By definition, most of us cannot be extraordinary. I, for one, am content to do my job well and be done with it. If you judge that poorly, that says more about you and our Protestant ethic than it does about me. I am happy to be happy now instead of delaying happiness for the unguaranteed prospect of increased happiness in the future.

Here Is Your Paycheck. Care to Donate to the Cause?

My employer wants me to donate money to its endowment. There is a big campaign to get at least half of the faculty here to contribute. I find this silly. Employers pay workers, not vice versa. As I see it, I would essentially be saying, "No, no, no, you pay me too much. Here is some of that money back so that you can do other things besides paying me." I think my logic holds regardless of institution type, but it's worth looking at how things might differ. I work at a public liberal arts college. We are, in part, funded by state monies (although, the control the state wields over us is far disproportionate to that meager--and shrinking--financing). If the people of this state, as represented by their elected officials, want state institutions to compete with private and out-of-state institutions, they need to mandate more funding, including that for higher salaries to recruit and retain qualified and prestigious professors. A similar argument holds, though, for private institutions. Their alumni tend to have deep pockets. Hit them up for more donations, not your workers. Overall, I find it perverse that employees should be asked to shoulder any burden. To suggest anything else is hegemonic at best and coercive at worst. Do not misunderstand; I firmly believe in the mission of this institution (at least as it is on paper if not in practice), but that does not change the economic relationship that is inherent to any work-related situation. Then again, this is the same system that forced me to take two weeks worth of unpaid furlough days a couple years ago.

The Literal Graveyard Shift

I was inspired by this list of authors' strange jobs to write about some of the jobs I've had.

When I was a pre-teen, I worked for a few summers as a groundskeeper for the local Little League park, raking and lining the infields before games. My parents matched the money that I saved, and I bought a kickass Schwinn Predator BMX bike with my earnings.

When I was 19, I worked as a bartender in a converted train depot in the Michigan beach community where I grew up. I think I learned more in this job about people than in any other job I've had to-date, but in retrospect, I didn't have the right temperament for it. I'm a relatively anxiety-prone guy, and that doesn't mix well with a dozen+ people simultaneously yelling orders at you.

By far the oddest and the more rewarding job I had before my current gig was as a gravedigger--yes, really. Not to get too morbid, but I dug graves for and buried eight people that summer of my 21st year. We did it by hand, with shovels and no backhoes. It was a physically grueling job, but I found it oddly spiritually rewarding. Being surrounded by death gives one an amazing appreciation for the living. There is a finality to burying a person, and I mean the physical act of burying, not watching a person being buried. We have separated ourselves so far from death that we've lost perspective on our lives. We need to recapture that.

The last job I had before I was solidly on track with my career was as an assistant at a college library as an undergraduate student. It was cake, but I learned a lot about how to behave in a professional situation.