The report of the UCSC Humanities Task Force was out Friday, prefaced by a grim
letter from the dean: apocalypse on the horizon, i.e. returning all open
provisions still remaining under Humanities control, and beginning to fire
staff and lecturers, while not hiring replacements for retiring faculty. The
division took care of the 2009-10 budget cut with furloughs (about 80%), and
cuts to research, graduate support, and lecturers (mostly in language, it
seems). The impending cut, for 2010–11, will be at least as large, perhaps
almost twice as large (from 975K to 1,950K), no matter what the state’s
governor does. He is currently gesturing towards the future, with incantations
regarding a constitutional amendment—another automatism—that would return
total funding of higher education in California to above 10%. Good luck.

The Task Force’s recommendations are:

• Rearrange the desk chairs (or try) and combine History of Consciousness, American Studies, and Feminist Studies in such a way that all tenured faculty are able to participate in graduate instruction;
• move the writing program under other auspices than the colleges (either VPDUE or the division), and offer greater use of GSIs. Another reshuffling.
• *and*, the meat of this report, seriously cut the language program (option a, page 2, i.e. “eliminating language offerings that support small or marginal curricular programs while focusing resources on languages that support major programmatic initiatives;” the other three options are impractical or simply incantations). Much ink, surprisingly, was devoted to the Language Program: reduce or cut Hebrew, Hindi, Portuguese, and Russian; reduce the number of courses in other languages; trim the series (can’t afford to have two years of language instruction now); maintain Spanish, Chinese, and Japanese (translation of “languages that help prepare a professional work force that serves the state of California and the Pacific Rim.”?). Strangely enough, while proposing cuts, the report wants to encourage the greater use of grads in language instruction. It speaks of departments in the plural that would identify graduate students who have the skills to teach foreign languages: I think we are talking about one department, Literature. This “would be an important element of their graduate study and essential for them to compete in the academic job market.” Yes, especially now: brilliant forecast on a market that is shutting down even on lecturers.

Welcome, incoming grad students: we have work for you in core courses, writing,
and even languages (no matter your level in a foreign language). So one can
maintain graduate programs that provide part-timers across the nation. The dance must continue. How delicately put, page 3:

Increasing the use of GSIs in the curricula of these programs offers a significant, as yet untapped opportunity to support graduate students in all disciplines with an interest in second-language pedagogy and/or pedagogy in college-level composition.

The Language Program at UCSC may lose forty courses in the coming two years, and several Language Lecturers their jobs. Retiring faculty in the Humanities won’t be replaced for at least two years. Staff will continue to be under tremendous pressure to work more and get paid less (and get fired). Salary reductions may stay in effect. Students’ tuition is dramatically up. Is this the only way to make up for the loss of state support at UCSC?

One area that could be cut is top administration, or at least that is what numbers suggest. If one tabulates the number of students (student headcount) at UCSC year by year from 1993 to 2008, and divides it by the number of executives (SMG and MSP) during the same years, one finds that while there were 134 students per executive in 1993, there were only 51 (50.8) students per executive in 2008. In 1993, there was a total of 76 (75.88) FTEs in the executive ranks, for a population of 10,173 students, but the number had jumped to 327 in 2008, for a population of 16,615 students. There may have been a number of reclassifications—especially of senior professional management—in the process. Still. The same kind of tabulation shows that the ratios for other categories of personnel have remained flat during the same period.

If UCSC in Fall 2008 had the same ratio of students per executive it had in 1993, it would have 124 executives, which is 203 fewer than it did have. Two hundred and three executives at, say, 125,000 dollars for salary and benefits represent an investment of 25 million dollars per year. Real money. How good is the investment? That is something worthy of analysis, and a question deserving of some good answers. One percent of this investment, about 250,000 dollars per year, that is near the cost of the number of language courses mentioned above.

This dramatic increase in senior management has been going on throughout UC, but the increase at UCSC is particularly steep. See the numbers, based on UCOP statistics.

The email program at UCSC gives the score of 3.84 (medium spam) to my incoming messages, because it considers “the date is grossly in the future.” As in La jetée, a favorite movie. And would we ever reach the future if bridges to it were not built by politicians and image-makers. Thank god Clinton had the forethought to build one to the twenty-first century. Bloavez mat d’an holl. Happy new year.

Now, to think with Babylon about the crisis we are in: financial, political, moral. At all levels, not only “them”. Where, against what and whom, how, have we (they, but not only they) sinned? To frame it in Babylonian terms: the gods are angry, but which and why? Marduk seems firmly in charge and the order the kings of Babylonia represent through their epics and temples (I am thinking of presidents, political bodies, institutional bodies, think tanks with their omens and oracles, etc.), all of this asserts it is functioning properly and orderly, that is, it is following divine order, the order of celestial bodies, as its own epics have it: economic and political theories (note: theories are visions), it is worshipping at the altars of freedom (as a reified good, out there to be worshipped with blood offerings, but no history of salvation) and democracy (people’s power, but for whom?). It is even quite ready to bring the full force of the “law” (the likes of the Hammurabi code, and its successors, nomos et lex, constitutions, law codes) to bear on the rebellious and impious, those who would tell stories of redemption from divine (and other) debt. Its justification for that? The sacredness of the holy order(s) needs to be maintained, and see, the proper sacrifices are being offered: the tuning of the financial machinery is being accomplished, and incense offered. Prophetic oracles are telling us an inexorable progress and an inexhaustibly upwards market, except for short divine bursts of anger, are here and there, hidden perhaps, obscured (by the incense?), but nonetheless of the “essence”. The gods can be propitiated, if only order is maintained: the divine order in the realm of ideas depends on our maintaining physical order hic et nunc. Are we to believe our high and low priests, our paid prophets and oniromancers, necromancers, providers of apotropaic baubles and trinkets, tea-leaf readers et al? They have been quiet recently, since last year actually, when they realized Marduk could get really mad and perhaps they themselves could be swallowed up by monsters. But whew, the storm and judgment seem to have been avoided for now, enormous holocausts have been offered, and the cult can resume for a while….

The name of a movement from villages or cities to the country, when taxation and other aspects of social life became unbearable in antiquity, especially in Roman Egypt, and people abandoned their legal home for extended periods of time, to withdraw from the reach of official power. Let’s go anachoretic, up to the country! But…. we are already up in the countryside! Ok, let’s go catachoretic, down to the country where a multitude will reconstitute another life of learning, work, and devotion.

Just home from a day of meetings and talking to students about papers, Latin, and other matters. I opened my email and read the following (email at 17h35):

An open letter to the UCSC community:

Today the UC Regents voted to increase student tuition by 32 percent. Over the past six months, tuition has increased almost 40 percent, pricing more and more students out of the UC system–which was once free for California residents. This increase is linked to a state-level de-prioritization of education. Today, California spends three times as much per prison inmate as it does per student in higher education.

Across the state, students are taking action to demonstrate our unwillingness to accept this state of affairs. The administration expected us to protest today, to ‘blow off steam’. But they think that, when all is said and done, we will quietly accept this massive fee increase. We will prove them wrong by taking back what is rightfully ours.

Today at UCLA, where the Regents held their meeting, thousands took to the streets. A group of students occupied Campbell Hall. At UC Davis, students are currently occupying an administrative building. And here at UCSC, several hundred students are occupying Kerr Hall, the building that houses top-level administrators. They are preparing a list of demands and refuse to leave until they have been met.

This action is part of a growing student movement across California and in Europe. At this very moment, hundreds of thousands of students all over the world are taking action to challenge both the privatization of education and, more generally, the implementation of policies that force students and workers to bear the burden of economic crisis. These tactics have worked in the past, and they will work now.

Students at Kerr Hall need your support immediately. We call on all students, workers, and community members to come join us. We have the power to change the university.

See some pictures and list of demands on Santa Cruz Indymedia. I repeat here what I just sent students in two classes a little while ago: I’m dismayed but not surprised by the decision the Regents took, down the political tree, to increase fees so massively, and in such a devastating way. Now we need all the courage, hope, wisdom, and—allow me even to use this old-fashioned word—the love of others we can muster (both ways) in thinking through what is going on and acting in the best way we can, no matter how grim things may look further down the road. We cannot wait for others to do it for us.

See this Democracy Now feature, 43 minutes long, about the strike called for tomorrow, November 18, as the Board of Regents is about to vote on a major tuition increase (32%) tomorrow morning. It is also, and more importantly, discussing fiscality, the rapidly increasing inequities in the distribution of wealth, privatization of profits, and socialization of losses.

So-called ed fees are redistributed by UC in grossly unfair ways. The formula for this redistribution is wrong and completely unequal. So for instance, UCSB and UCSC retain about 80% of these ed fees locally. UCLA and more massively UCSF profit from the formula. Whatever these two campuses do with the money doesn’t seem to be redistributed to the system. I say “doesn’t seem”, because I’d like to know more about how much money flows back to UC central admin from the myriad of federally funded research projects. Perhaps much more money comes back to UCOP from these professional schools than is put in? How much and what is done with it? Read about it here (94kb pdf). Conclusion: in the absence of transparency and fairness in the distribution of the fees, especially now when they are becoming a more important source of revenue than state support, and the inequity in the distribution is exacerbated, it is important to oppose any increase.

The new USS ship New York apparently contains 7.5 tons of steel taken from one of the Twin towers, melted down and turned into part of her bow. The New York is part of about 600 ships or so that ply the seven seas. To defend what exactly? In asking that question, I’m thinking especially of the 40 + US nuclear submarines, 30 of which perhaps are operational at any given time, each with more power to kill people indiscriminately than many or all of our present potential enemies put together.

I cannot get dewy-eyed about the USS New York and her steel rostrum. I was moved when I watched the terrorist attack unfold on my TV screen on 9/11. I was moved because I knew that this terrible destruction of human lives didn’t have to be. It didn’t have to be because violence serves no good. It didn’t have to be because, as this catastrophe was about to happen, many of the financial and insurance mechanisms served by the offices located in those buildings did not serve the good of the people. I’m not thinking about the people in those two buildings, but about the mechanisms. No one can separate the good from the evil with any finality. But the extraordinary returns that investment funds expect as a matter of course in the frenzy of competition called the market depend in the end on the manipulation of labor and natural resources that should be treated with justice always in mind. And one may recognize part of oneself in them: ordinary salaries and pensions are tied to those operations. So, when I hear that the same stuff that went to make buildings serving universal greed is now part of a military ship, I think: how logical. Whether the steel is in the tower or in the ship, its purpose has not really changed. If anything, it has been clarified and become unalloyed in a new kind of crucible.

Are we to believe that this piece of steel became holy by its proximity with the victims of the attack on the twin towers? And that molding it into the prow of a military ship makes all of the military operations now going on in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Irak, Persian Gulf, somehow holy and therefore beyond discussion? Like pieces of Jesus’ putative cross placed as relics in all the altars of mediaeval Christendom? Who would have thought that many Christians in this country would condone the trafic of relics? Can’t they remember at least that the tomb of Jesus was found empty and that the source of holiness is nowhere to be touched and approximated? Who would have thought that a “liberal” US secretary of State, surely aware of all of this, and who knows her Isaiah, would go along and say at the commissioning of the ship, somewhat in the style of John’s gospel: “In that steel, burned but unbroken, lives the spirit we saw on 9-11. Sometimes our pain can lead us to purpose”? What purpose?

The public operation is clear: to draw political power magically from innocent victims, to transform an object that was near them into a holy relic and hope to sacralize an aimless war machinery (a transport ship in this case), from the bow to the rest of the ship, sailors, navy, army, Pentagon, and political establishment. And rope all of us in the same devotion. I do not want to be part of this kind of synecdochic, fraudulent transport of the senses. But then, how do I show respect to the victims, all the victims, and resist the violent, all the violent? I believe there are other ways…. As for politics, nothing new under the sun: much of Washington’s power derives from the proximity of monuments to mostly young innocent lives sacrificed (in many cases at least) for the good of the people. As does that of the Kremlin, with its heroes buried in its walls, and a still unburied, spectral, embalmed Lenin being visited by crowds. One could go on and on, beginning with the story about Abraham who was tested on that very thing, the need to use innocent victims to build institutions and capital. That is where we are now: we do not have an ounce of rationality left in the defense of economic interests run amok and we resort to all tricks, including the religious shenanigans of a Constantine and successors in the 4th c. CE.

For memento, Isaiah 2.3c–4:

For out of Zion shall go forth the law,
and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.
He shall judge between the nations,
and shall decide for many peoples;
and they shall beat their swords into plowshares,
and their spears into pruning hooks;

One final word on this subject: the distance from sources of wealth, be they workers and employees or natural resources, is constitutive of financial instruments. The symbolisation inherent to money since the 6th c. BCE, towers as tall as can be, the marvelous symbolization of symbols (derivatives), everything spells distance, as well as a fascination with leveraging and the miracle of making things happen from afar, almost effortlessly. That distance is the opposite of the nearness and physical presence sought in sacralizing the instruments of power which permit and defend the overpowering controls and injustices that distance precisely allows and fosters. There is a proper use of distance and leverage, as there is of nearness and presence, but we have lost sight of it here and now.

Jeff Bleich, recent trustee of the California State University system and chair of the Board of Trustees for the past two years gives a kiss and tell story in a Nov 4, 2009, LA Times opinion. He rightly deplores the unraveling of public higher education in the state.

I’ll believe the stats he gives regarding the evolution of the state budget. The master plan of the sixties for higher education has been abandoned, he says. I say: it has been destroyed, and willfully. More below on this evil will. In any case, here are the broad numbers he gives on prisons and higher education. In the 1980s, 17% of the budget went to higher education, 3% for prisons. Now, 10% of our budget goes to prisons (24 new prisons built recently, how many for or by private companies?), and 9% for higher education institutions. Note that the share of the budget represented by those two expenditures of public money has remained constant, about 20%.

So Mr. Bleich now shouts from the mountain tops: Hear ye, this must stop, shame, let’s go back to greatness and promise. Ok, but where is the analysis of why this happened? Well, he does go a bit in the political choices made by the people of California and their political leaders, but not very far. He explains that

To win votes, political leaders mandated long prison sentences that forced us to stop building schools and start building prisons. [….] Leaders pandered by promising tax cuts no matter what and did not worry about how to provide basic services without that money. [….] To remain in office, they carved out legislative districts that ensured we would have few competitive races and leaders with no ability or incentive to compromise. Rather than strengthening the parties, it pushed both parties to the fringes and weakened them.

One needs to go further and explain why they “pandered”. The appeals to security are used precisely by the kind of politicians who need to hide their service to greed (e.g. by dismantling public energy companies, farming out of health and education to private companies, opposition of regulatory agencies concerning commerce, banking, insurance, real estate interests). Their appeal to security, public order, and mouthing of “unassailable freedoms”, are simply gross tricks and hypocritical covers. And all too often, too many of the representatives who don’t share these views still go along with the program, namely the dismantling of public services.