Fuck Me

it begins again, I made the mistake of reading something by Megan. This piece on tenure is just so monumentally wrong in every imaginable way I have to write a long ranty response, to be read by potentially dozens. The assault on academia and education in general inherent in it is just... no. It's amazing she can write so many words about how she doesn't like anyone who actually knows anything. Megan depends on ignorance, both general and willful, as the basis of her work, so I suppose it's natural for her to hate teachers as a group. But in the past she seemed mostly concerned with high school teachers, who are, primarily, government employees. That makes ideological sense, but her words about college and university professors sound almost personal, as if she hates them for having told her she's wrong or inherently mediocre so many times. People who are informed about their subjects and trained to craft concise, coherent arguments seem to piss off Megan the same way hot girls piss off /b/tards; they want, but will never have.
Anyway, let's get to the stupid;

The arguments for academic tenure have always struck me as pretty weak, and more to the point, transparently self-serving. The best you can say of the system is that it preserves a sort of continuity in schools that is desireable [sic] for the purposes of cultivating alumni donations. But the cost of such a system is simply staggering.

I almost wonder if she consciously placed that huge steaming pile of projection at the very beginning to be a stumbling block for anyone who will criticize her. Yes, tenure is an imperfect system and yes it is abused by some granted power in it and yes it can shield incompetents, but all that and far worse can be said for fucking capitalism, especially the corporate crony based variety currently dominant which Megan considers the most important and sacred thing humanity has ever created. But concern troll needs something to shift concern onto, and as always her ideological blinders help lead the way. Problems in academia aren't due to endowments shrinking in the economic meltdown or American society being profoundly anti-intellectual in character leading to a general bias against knowing what the fuck you're talking about because the economic meltdown was a blameless act of God and/or poor people who bought houses and, as said, Megan depends on ignorance in order to sound plausible. That only leaves tenure.
I had to read the following, so you do too;

Consider what the academic job market now looks like. You have a small elite on top who have lifetime employment regardless of how little work they do. This lifetime employment commences somewhere between 35 and 40. For the ten-to-fifteen years before that, they spend their lives in pursuit of the brass ring. They live in poverty suck up to professors, and publish, for one must publish to be tenured. It's very unfortunate if you don't have anything much worth saying; you need to publish anyway, in order to improve your chances. Fortunately, for the needy tenure seeker, a bevy of journals have sprung up that will print your trivial contributions. If nothing else, they provide a nice simple model which helps introductory economics professors explain Say's Law.

How this differs from Megan's career path and context is, of course, not something you should think about. In no way does becoming a Village Pundit resemble being granted tenure, move along. This is not Megan whining about her own life after the bursting of the tech bubble killed her financial sector job before it ever started a decade and change ago, so shut up.

At the end of the process, most of the aspirants do not have tenure; they have dropped out, or been dropped, at some point along the way. Meanwhile, the system has ripped up their lives in other ways. They've invested their whole youth, and are back on the job market near entry level at an age when most of their peers have spent ten years building up marketable skills. Many of them will have seen relationships ripped apart by the difficulties of finding not one, but two tenure-track jobs in the same area. Others will have invested their early thirties in a college town with no other industry, forcing them to move elsewhere to restart both their careers and their social lives. Or perhaps they string along adjuncting at near-poverty wages, unable to quite leave the academy that has abused them for so long.

Meanwhile, every MBA is guaranteed either an executive level position at a Fortune500 company or a small successful business of their own to run. "Adjuncting" (which we're pretending is a word) is in no way comparable to corporations firing employees then rehiring them as temps or independent contractors so as to avoid paying benefits. And there are no non-financial personal benefits to choosing a life learning about and sharing a subject you love, so being an adjunct prof of English at a community college is exactly as dreary a life as working in a cubicle processing paperwork for who the fuck cares what purpose.
Back to Megan;

Is this producing better education? Doubtful; there's no particular relationship between scholarship and the ability to teach. How about valuable scholarship? Well, define valuable--in many liberal arts fields, the only possible consumer of the research in question is a handful of scholars in the same field. That sort of research is valuable in the same way that children's craft projects are priceless--to their mothers. Basically, these people are supporting an expensive hobby with a sideline business certifying the ability of certain twenty-year olds to write in complete sentences.

Go look for yourself, she actually wrote "there's no particular relationship between scholarship and the ability to teach". She thinks she's saying the biggest expert isn't always the best teacher and adding a non-sequitur empty tautology like "statistics can be uncertain" in place of a premise in a valid argument, but she couldn't even manage to do that much coherently. She might as well have said there's no particular relation between a knowledge of human anatomy and the ability to operate.
Moving on;

And what about the people who do get tenure, and are producing scholarship in areas that other people care about? Doesn't tenure protect free intellectual inquiry? Diversity of thought? Doesn't it allow teachers to be more demanding of students?

Ummm, yeah, it does.

Perhaps--but the question is, at what point?

...
I'm going to go kill 50 people and see if it calms me down at all.
...
Nope.
She admits the best arguments in favor of tenure, namely academic freedom and the ability to respond appropriately to ignorance in pupils, are valid, but irrelevant. Why, you ask?

Most scholars in their sixties are not producing path-breaking new research, but they are precisely the people that tenure protects. Scholars in their twenties and thirties, on the other hand, have no academic freedom at all. Indeed, because tenure raises the stakes so high, the vetting of future employees is much more careful--and the candidates, who know this, are almost certainly more careful than they would be if they were on more ordinary employment contracts. As a result, the process of getting a degree, getting a job, and getting tenure has stretched out to cover one's whole youth. So tenure makes young scholars--the kind most likely to attack a dominant paradigm--probably more careful than they would be under more normal employment process.

Yes, it's because old people are dumb, and forget how to read. And they make everyone in the department pretend their faulty memories are accurate, which is why I always thought Hamlet said "To be or to buy new socks?" until I saw the play performed.
Megan is actually demonstrating intellectual insecurity to think the liberal arts portions of academia are intellectually monolithic and discourage new and challenging interpretations. All institutions have structural inertia, which is no excuse when it's found in academia, but the ratio of bad scholars unwilling to or incapable of recognizing the flaws in their own arguments to stifled geniuses is high enough to break Megan's calculator.

The same is true of diversity. Academics within the tenure system are probably more careful about weeding out heresy, because they'll be stuck with it if it manages to sneak in. Tenure can easily be used to entrench the ideological or scholarly commitments of a department's powerful members, reducing diversity rather than enhancing it.

Granted, this is anecdotal, but in my undergrad philosophy dept there was a legendary tale of an actual fistfight breaking out after a dept meeting between two tenured professors over how to interpret Plato's Republic. Groupthink is a genuine danger, but the type of professor who tries to force their views on an entire department isn't going to be eliminated with tenure, or even necessarily changed in the least. Bullies are bullies, and they'll use whatever means they can to be what they are.

The current tenure system only protects revolutionary, dangerous ideas to the extent that they spring full blown from an academic's head after he has secured tenure, startling the hell out of everyone who hired him. Or perhaps after he's secured his full professorship. Or after he's managed to move to a better class of research institution with a nicer salary.

This is quite simply wrong. Any scholar worth their weight can probably name half a dozen doctoral theses at least which made major impact on their fields and were subsequently publicly published to even greater impact. Even knowing Megan's stupidity as well as I do I can't understand how she could make this claim. It's like saying rookies are prohibited by Major League Baseball from winning the batting title. You have to be deeply, deeply seeped in movement conservative anti-intellectualism to even consider this claim plausible. In other words, you have to be as ignorant as Megan to agree.

Since I don't know of many cases where this has happened, I find it hard to believe that tenure is crucial to preserving the spirit of free inquiry at our nation's colleges. I'm sure it's protected more than one scholar from getting fired after making stupid remarks to a class. And we would all of us--not just academics--like to be immune from getting fired for making stupid remarks. But what's not clear to me is that this has, in any instance, protected Very Important Scholarship from being censored for the benefit of Mrs. Grundy.

Yes, irony just died again, Megan made a stupid remark indicating her lack of awareness of her own insulation from the consequences of making stupid remarks. But there's a second layer of shading to the irony you might miss, of the corporate propagandist questioning whether the honest scholar needs protections from the "market forces" which placed her hack self in a position of false authority. Megan has to believe she rose on talent, lest self-awareness creep into her head and the cookie crumble.
Thanks Jebus, we're almost done.

Even if it were, I'd want to know if all that Very Important Scholarship were worth the enormous cost of this outmoded system. And advocates would have a steep uphill battle to convince me that it is.

The "enormous cost" demonstrated by Megan being that people have to work hard at their career with no guarantees of eventual success, and that academia sometimes struggles to be open to new ideas. This is her actual argument against tenure, and she's damn well pleased with it. I can't go on, and thankfully don't have to. I hope this doesn't mean I'm going to start doing this regularly again, she's really fucking stupid.

Actually About Megan

Start over at Susan's, I'll wait.

Back?

Ok, so zosima replied and Megan responded. I can't figure out how to find the link for that comment, but you just need to scroll down a lil for it, or you can read it now;

Ooooooh, snap!

More-in-sorrow-than-in-anger requires making some point I find at least tangentially interesting.

On a serious note, don't worry that you hurt my feelings. Mosquitos don't need to hurt my feelings to piss me off. I don't like nasty internet invective. And not because I'm not good at it. Invective is fun, but entirely counterproductive, which is why I deploy it only with people who a) use it liberally themselves and b) have ignored myriad previous warning shots across the bow.

Contempt is only a good arguing tool if the person you're arguing with wants your respect. And, respectfully, you haven't earned mine, so I don't really care about yours. Only the very young, the very stupid, or the very insecure are impressed by the condescension of random others, and alas, I am no longer any of those things.

Had you attempted straight argument, stripped of the attempt to project a superiority you didn't work for, you might have won that respect; there are a lot of liberals whose opinions I do care for. You are very welcome to attempt to be one of those liberals; or you can go away. But the very next time you express the merest sliver of contempt for me, or anyone else on this thread, I'll ban you.

Note to others, ideologically sympatico or not: this is one of my periodic housecleanings. Be nice to one another. Both liberals and conservatives have fallen prey to my axe before, and I'm ready to start swinging again. You know I love each and every one of you, but that doesn't mean we can all live in the same house.

Queen Megan hath spoken. Thou shalt dote upon her Ladyship's feelings, or thou shalt be exiled from her lands.

Things That Make You Go Bullshit

Uhhhh....

Shahzad tried to detonate a car bomb in a Nissan Pathfinder on May 1, but the device fizzled and caused no injuries. But if the bomb had been detonated properly, it could have "killed in the thousands on the high end" and in the "hundreds on the low end," according to a source familiar with the investigation.

Wait, so, an attack that destroys two of the largest buildings in the entire country completely kills only 3000, and we're supposed to believe that a fucking car bomb at a busy intersection is going to kill 1/3 of that?

That must've been one hell of an M-80....

Savage Fail

I'd say fire Terry Savage, except the woman is too amusing. She's written a defense of yelling at little girls who wanted to share, which reads like she's hoping most will just glance at it and mistakenly conclude she's not an utterly unreasonable loon. The problem is she's a syndicated economics pundit, not an actual writer, and she doesn't have the talent with words to genuinely cover her ass.
Let's start with the second mini-graf of her now infamous previous piece;

Last week, I was in a car with my brother and his fiancee, driving through their upscale neighborhood on a hot summer day. At the corner, we all noticed three little girls sitting at a homemade lemonade stand. (My emphasis.)

Later she has her brother say "I'm really thirsty", as well.
And now, from near the conclusion to her newer self-defense;

The children weren't rescuing people from the heat, since it was a temperate day. They were just looking for something to do -- and there was no one around to teach them how a lemonade stand should really work.

Mmmm, that's good intellectual honesty, even if it is a tiny, tiny point. But she's the one who chose to lie about it.
Her actual arguments are, as you'd expect, of comparable quality.

Clearly there is a great misconception that entrepreneurship and generosity are incompatible. But that's far from the truth. Just look at Bill Gates and Warren Buffett -- two of our country's greatest entrepreneurs, who are in the process of giving away hundreds of millions of dollars to causes they think are worthwhile. But first they had to earn that money!

I'm sure Susan's authoritarian radar is perking up here, as it's clear that in Savage's mind only Daddy can legitimately give stuff to poor people, as only Daddy earned that money by sitting in an office and telling other people to do things between trips to the golf course. And if he gives his favorite caddy at the course a home loan at a couple points off prime, well, it's his money to play with isn't it.

My column was intended as a lesson on entrepreneurship -- not as a criticism of charitable giving, which I value highly on a personal basis. And the lemonade stand was not only a lesson for children, but a metaphor for our financial troubles today. We need entrepreneurs to create jobs and keep America growing out of this recession.

In other words, she's just going to restate the premises she mistakes for a conclusion and not respond to the criticism. And her concluding example of what she's presumably using as her evidence of valuing charitable giving?

For many years, I've been on the board of Junior Achievement in Chicago and have been an adviser to the Women's Business Development Center. Both are organizations dedicated to teaching about the opportunities of our free enterprise system. This is especially important for girls who might otherwise grow into young women still earning only about 73 cents on the dollar compared with men -- an average pay discrepancy for jobs in large companies. Surely, we want to help them do better.

Gender based pay discrepancies are obviously a genuine injustice, but Ms. Savage seems to be confusing charity with working to increase her paycheck. It's not selfish, at least not presumably, but the personal benefit you get from charitable giving isn't really supposed to be financial. I realize her work at those groups probably extends beyond that issue, but it's telling that's all she mentioned.
What she doesn't do is genuinely address the criticism of her argument that the little girls should not have been nice to people but instead trying to make a market out of everything, just like economists and wannabe economist pundits do. If they don't learn to commercialize and monetize every single aspect of human life and interaction now they might learn to see people as, well, people, and not walking economic units that are more 'real' on paper. Sure, stupid laws say you can't make children actually work most jobs and severely limit their hours the rest of the time, but that doesn't mean you have to let them have a childhood. 7 or 8 is plenty old enough to be forced into capitalism, and like most other religions it takes constant repetition of the institutional absurdities to turn them from laughable to holy. These little girls run the risk of not learning to think "how can I make a dollar off them?" when meeting new people. Terry Savage has a problem with that, and for the millionth time I'm left to wonder if there's something about economics that turns many of its students into borderline sociopaths, or if the field just attracts them.

I Don't Think She's Joking

Meet Terry Savage:

Last week, I was in a car with my brother and his fiancee, driving through their upscale neighborhood on a hot summer day. At the corner, we all noticed three little girls sitting at a homemade lemonade stand.

Awwww.

The three young girls -- under the watchful eye of a nanny, sitting on the grass with them -- explained that they had regular lemonade, raspberry lemonade, and small chocolate candy bars.

Then my brother asked how much each item cost.

"Oh, no," they replied in unison, "they're all free!"

AWWWWWWWWWWW, how nice. They're sharing their candy with strangers, sweetly inverting the idiom. Surely Ms. Savage is about to tell us how these girls have amazing parents and a great nanny.

I sat in the back seat in shock. Free? My brother questioned them again: "But you have to charge something? What should I pay for a lemonade? I'm really thirsty!"

His fiancee smiled and commented, "Isn't that cute. They have the spirit of giving."

That really set me off, as my regular readers can imagine.

"No!" I exclaimed from the back seat. "That's not the spirit of giving. You can only really give when you give something you own. They're giving away their parents' things -- the lemonade, cups, candy. It's not theirs to give." *

... Ok, but she still is going to be nice to the little girls, right?

I pushed the button to roll down the window and stuck my head out to set them straight.

"You must charge something for the lemonade," I explained. "That's the whole point of a lemonade stand. You figure out your costs -- how much the lemonade costs, and the cups -- and then you charge a little more than what it costs you, so you can make money. Then you can buy more stuff, and make more lemonade, and sell it and make more money."

That's right, she publicly berated little girls for not being more greedy. Despite it sounding like they have parents who are quite capable of giving them quite a bit, these girls should be grabbing desperately at every penny like good patriotic American capitalists. In fact, little girls being nice to strangers is what's wrong with this country.

No wonder America is getting it all wrong when it comes to government, and taxes, and policy. We all act as if the "lemonade" or benefits we're "giving away" is free.

And so the voters demand more -- more subsidies for mortgages, more bailouts, more loan modification and longer periods of unemployment benefits.

Really, she's not kidding.

The government only gets the money to pay these benefits by raising taxes, meaning taxpayers pay for the "free lemonade." Or by printing money -- which is essentially a tax on savings, since printing more money devalues the wealth we hold in dollars.

If we can't teach our kids the basics of running a lemonade stand, how can we ever teach Congress the basics of economics?

It's quite clear; being taught to care about other people is the same as being taught to hate America, land of the free (corporation). And how dare Congress be so ignorant as to try to direct unemployment funds to those people who have been paying into the system for years and now need help when there are rich people who aren't sufficiently pleased with the amount of free money they receive?
She's not done yet, either.

Or maybe it's the other way around: The kids are learning from the society around them. No one has ever taught them there's no free lunch -- and all they see is "free," not the result of hard work, and saving, and scrimping.

If that's what America's children think -- that there's a free lunch waiting -- then our country has larger problems ahead. The Declaration of Independence promised "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." It didn't promise anything free. Something to think about this July 4th holiday weekend.

Yes, look around the US today and the clear problem is everything is being given away for free. The kindness of a few young girls shows that what's wrong with the country is the kids might possibly be being taught to expect everything for free by policies designed to try to help the suffering not slip into abject poverty via paltry sums. The woman actually titled a column about being offered free lemonade "There Is No Free Lemonade". Her do logic good.
I know what you're thinking, this didn't actually happen, no one could be so ideologically compromised as to yell at little girls for offering her free lemonade on a hot day, this is just another wingnut cabdriver apocryphal story. Maybe, but she's committed to the lie.

This column is a true story -- every word of it. And I think it very appropriate to consider around the Fourth of July, Independence Day spirit.

I might visit this thoughtful woman's work again someday.

* - They aren't the girls' things to give, but they are the girls' things to profit from, and if the parents asked for a cut of the profits that would be government intrusion on the free market. This sounds like tortured logic, but it's quite simple. If something was given to you, like the candy to the girls, it's rude to re-gift it. Selling it shows you valued it, like corporations using publicly owned resources.

Edited to correct Terry Savage's gender. Thanx tree.

Shame: Not At Work Here

We see that McArdle has copped David Weigel's one-time WaPo end-of-day link dump title.

Americium Football

These Manning/Timberlake commercials are pretty much ensuring beyond all doubt I will never buy a Sony again. I don't care if those fuckers cure cancer and then donate their profits from that cure to renewable starving puppies. I can never forgive them for the monsoon of smarm they release upon me every time I sit down to watch some damn soccer.

Hey, look, the tag is appropriate now!

OMG, it just came on again as I was posting this. FUCKING WHORE.

Manningicide should be legal. Timberlake can get off with extensive torture, castration and the removal of his voice box, but Manning(s) have to fucking die.

My New Career

Megan's stupid. I've decided to become an internet sensation instead of worrying about her. Here's my first go at it. I'm pretty sure it will be the most popular video on the internet in a few hours.

Dear Tbogg,

I'd just like to point out I thought of dumping responsibility for mocking Megan on Susan first. Mhm.
Carry on.

Now That We Won't Have Megatron To Kick Around For A Wk. Or Two

Megan to get hitched: Better late than never, eh? (Full disclosure: This reporter has never been married. As a libertarian libertine I'm much too dedicated to my freedom principles to enter into a contract w/ someone for emotional support or whatever the hell they do this for.)

And this is not funny:

We are finally on the brink of that happy moment that every girl dreams of:  a qualified change in family status under section 125 of the tax code.

And I've no idea why they think it's funny. The intention may be self-deprecation, but it's usually more self-revelatory.

This may be a revelation as well:

It turns out weddings are complicated, and require a great deal of last-minute detail management. Especially when you have to push your column through fact check before you are allowed to depart.

Not that weddings are a pain, but the resentment behind "push through fact check."

Other mental images to be avoided (As well as use of "hopefully."):

hopefully I'll come back fortified by blissful romance + long hours spent lying on the beach.

I won't wish the future Mrs. Suderman ill. (Don't forget the sun-block!) The present Mr. Suderman, well, good luck, pal.