Follow the PNCA Action Coalition as we struggle for student empowerment and economic justice at the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, OR. To join us, email us at [email protected]
On June 21st, the PNCA Action Coalition held a screening of Ivory Tower: The High Cost of Education at Compliance Division gallery.
As tuition rates spiral beyond reach and student loan debt passes $1 trillion (more than credit card debt), IVORY TOWER asks: Is college worth the cost? From the halls of Harvard, to public colleges in financial crisis, to Silicon Valley, filmmaker Andrew Rossi (PAGE ONE: INSIDE THE NEW YORK TIMES) assembles an urgent portrait of a great American institution at the breaking point.
Through profiles at Arizona State, Cooper Union, and San Jose State —among several others—IVORY TOWER reveals how colleges in the United States, long regarded as leaders in higher education, came to embrace a business model that often promotes expansion over quality learning. But along the way we also find unique programs, from Stanford to the free desert school Deep Springs to the historically black all women’s college Spelman, where the potential for life-changing college experiences endure. Ultimately, IVORY TOWER asks, What price will society pay if higher education cannot revolutionize college as we know it and evolve a sustainable economic model?
Fast food workers in NY just won a $15/hr wage.
I’m a paramedic. My job requires a broad set of skills: interpersonal, medical, and technical skills, as well as the crucial skill of performing under pressure. I often make decisions on my own, in seconds, under chaotic circumstances, that impact people’s health and lives. I make $15/hr.
And these burger flippers think they deserve as much as me?
Good for them.
Look, if any job is going to take up someone’s life, it deserves a living wage. If a job exists and you have to hire someone to do it, they deserve a living wage. End of story. There’s a lot of talk going around my workplace along the lines of, “These guys with no education and no skills think they deserve as much as us? Fuck those guys.” And elsewhere on FB: “I’m a licensed electrician, I make $13/hr, fuck these burger flippers.”
And that’s exactly what the bosses want! They want us fighting over who has the bigger pile of crumbs so we don’t realize they made off with almost the whole damn cake. Why are you angry about fast food workers making two bucks more an hour when your CEO makes four hundred TIMES what you do? It’s in the bosses’ interests to keep your anger directed downward, at the poor people who are just trying to get by, like you, rather than at the rich assholes who consume almost everything we produce and give next to nothing for it.
My company, as they’re so fond of telling us in boosterist emails, cleared 1.3 billion dollars last year. They expect guys supporting families on 26-27k/year to applaud that. And that’s to say nothing of the techs and janitors and cashiers and bed pushers who make even less than us, but are as absolutely crucial to making a hospital work as the fucking CEO or the neurosurgeons. Can they pay us more? Absolutely. But why would they? No one’s making them.
The workers in NY *made* them. They fought for and won a living wage. So how incredibly petty and counterproductive is it to fuss that their pile of crumbs is bigger than ours? Put that energy elsewhere. Organize. Fight. Win.
Jens Rushing (via albinwonderland)
"Look, if any job is going to take up someone’s life, it deserves a living wage. If a job exists and you have to hire someone to do it, they deserve a living wage. End of story."
The Bureau of Labor and Industries promotes the development of a highly-skilled, competitive workforce in Oregon through partnerships with government, labor, business, and educational institutions. BOLI protects the rights of workers and citizens to equal, non-discriminatory treatment; encourages and enforces compliance with state laws relating to wages, hours, terms and conditions of employment; and advocates policies that balance the demands of the workplace and employers with the protections of workers and their families. If an employee believes they have been discriminated against or have not received their proper wages, they may file a complaint with the BOLI Wage and Hour Division.
The Bureau of Labor and Industries promotes the development of a highly-skilled, competitive workforce in Oregon through partnerships with government, labor, business, and educational institutions. BOLI protects the rights of workers and citizens to equal, non-discriminatory treatment; encourages and enforces compliance with state laws relating to wages, hours, terms and conditions of employment; and advocates policies that balance the demands of the workplace and employers with the protections of workers and their families. If an employee believes they have been discriminated against or have not received their proper wages, they may file a complaint with the BOLI Wage and Hour Division.
More than 10,000 students are expected to benefit from a last-minute bill passed by legislators this week that makes Oregon only the second state (after Tennessee) to offer free community college.The
Free Cooper Union, founded in Fall 2012, is a group of students and alumni working towards free...
Free Cooper Union, founded in Fall 2012, is a group of students and alumni working towards free education to all.
We affirm:
Tuition is a betrayal of Cooper Union’s radical mission, in addition to the fact that it isn’t a sustainable financial model.
Higher education around the world is in dire need of a paradigm shift.
The debate about “tuition” at Cooper must engage broader dialogues about student debt, educational reform, alternative models of governance, and social justice.
This is not a financial scandal, it’s a cultural crisis.
To this end, we have employed a wide range of tactics including but not limited to: drafting petitions, holding walk outs, hosting summits, igniting memes, building satirical websites, mounting art exhibitions, creating music videos, leading parades, staging historical reenactments, authoring publications, posterbombing, culture-jamming, breaking into meetings, leaking documents, dropping banners, talking to press, building barricades, occupying, and envisioning futures and possibilities.
A new study by Princeton University researchers puts a figure on happiness: $75,000 a year
People say money doesn't buy happiness. Except, according to a new study from Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School, it sort of does — up to about $75,000 a year. The lower a person's annual income falls below that benchmark, the unhappier he or she feels. But no matter how much more than $75,000 people make, they don't report any greater degree of happiness.
Before employers rush to hold — or raise — everyone's salary to $75,000, the study points out that there are actually two types of happiness. There's your changeable, day-to-day mood: whether you're stressed or blue or feeling emotionally sound. Then there's the deeper satisfaction you feel about the way your life is going — the kind of thing Tony Robbins tries to teach you. While having an income above the magic $75,000 cutoff doesn't seem to have an impact on the former (emotional well-being), it definitely improves people's Robbins-like life satisfaction. In other words, the more people make above $75,000, the more they feel their life is working out on the whole. But it doesn't make them any more jovial in the mornings.
The study, by economist Angus Deaton and psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who has won a Nobel Prize for Economics, analyzed the responses of 450,000 Americans polled by Gallup and Healthways in 2008 and 2009. Participants were asked how they had felt the previous day and whether they were living the best possible life for them. They were also asked about their income.
The authors found that most Americans — 85% — regardless of their annual income, felt happy each day. Almost 40% of respondents also reported feeling stressed (which is not mutually exclusive with happiness) and 24% had feelings of sadness. Most people were also satisfied with the way their life was going.
(See TIME's special issue on the science of happiness.)
So, where does the $75,000 come into play? Researchers found that lower income did not cause sadness itself but made people feel more ground down by the problems they already had. The study found, for example, that among divorced people, about 51% who made less than $1,000 a month reported feeling sad or stressed the previous day, while only 24% of those earning more than $3,000 a month reported similar feelings. Among people with asthma, 41% of low earners reported feeling unhappy, compared with about 22% of the wealthier group. Having money clearly takes the sting out of adversities.
At $75,000, that effect disappears. For people who earn that much or more, individual temperament and life circumstances have much more sway over their lightness of heart than money. The study doesn't say why $75,000 is the benchmark, but "it does seem to me a plausible number at which people would think money is not an issue," says Deaton. At that level, people probably have enough expendable cash to do things that make them feel good, like going out with friends. (The federal poverty level for a family of four, by the way, is $22,050.)
But in the bigger view of their lives, people's evaluations were much more tied to their income. The more they made, the more they felt their life was going well. The survey asked respondents to place themselves on a life-satisfaction ladder, with the first rung meaning their lives were not going well and the 10th rung meaning it was as good as it could be. The higher their income, the higher the rung people chose. "Importantly, the same percentage increase in income has the same effect on evaluation for everyone, rich or poor alike, even though the absolute dollar amounts differ," the authors write. So every 10% rise in annual income moves people up the satisfaction ladder the same amount, whether they're making $25,000 or $100,000. "High incomes don't bring you happiness, but they do bring you a life you think is better," conclude the authors. Might it be time for Oprah to give these guys their own show?
Past research on money and happiness has also found that it's not absolute wealth that's linked with happiness, but relative wealth or status — that is, how much more money you have than your neighbors.
It's no surprise, then, that when the same polls are done in different countries, Americans come out as a bit of a mixed lot: they're fifth in terms of happiness, 33rd in terms of smiling and 10th in terms of enjoyment. At the same time, they're the 89th biggest worriers, the 69th saddest and fifth most stressed people out of the 151 nations studied. Even so, perhaps because of the country's general wealth, they are in the top 10 citizenries where people feel their lives are going well, beaten out by such eternal optimists as the Canadians, New Zealanders and Scandinavians.
Right. Now that Princeton researchers have untangled that life mystery, maybe someone at MIT can look into the optimal amount of money required to buy us love.
This talk is from WIRED by Design, a two-day live magazine event that celebrated all forms of creative problem solving.
Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs, hint at a different model for higher education: a buffet of subjects, taught by some of the world’s brightest instructors, all available on demand. But they’re not the only vision for reinventing college. Far from it.
At WIRED by Design, Sarah Stein Greenberg, executive director of Stanford Design School, shared a handful of concepts for redesigning college, culled from a year long workshop. Specifically, they look at how to keep the on-campus experience relevant in an age where online learning is becoming increasingly common. One of the provocations, called Open Loop University, wonders what could happen if you gave students six years of college to use whenever they wanted throughout their adult life.
This sort of speculative thinking is meant to address growing concerns about the traditional four-year undergraduate track—basically that today’s system makes way for a bunch of well-trained sheep. “This is a generation of students who are incredibly highly structured, but they’re going to be entering an increasingly ambiguous world,” Stein Greenberg says. “We need to be training our students not just to expect that they will be society’s leaders, but also to be our most creative, daring, and resilient problem solvers.”
SAN FRANCISCO — It is no longer a stretch to draw connections between adjunct professors and other workers in the service economy. The corporate university model is deeply invested in the notion th...
SAN FRANCISCO — On March 8 the first Bay Area Arts and Education Justice Festival took place, bringing activists, teachers, and artists together around shared concerns about economic precariousness for artist-educators and broader social justice issues for workers and activists throughout the community. Held at The Lab, one of the few remaining arts spaces in San Francisco’s rapidly-gentrifying (and thus heavily policed) Mission District, the festival (titled “No Justice, No Service”) worked to move from campus-bound struggles over wages and working conditions to wider cross-class alliances coalescing around fights to live and work with dignity and security in the Bay Area, where high rents have pushed artists, teachers, and service workers to the margins. In addition to adjunct union organizers, we heard from students, fellow teachers and union activists, fast food workers organizing around the Fight for $15 struggle, poets and artists who address issues of police violence, gentrification, and debt, as well as members of the Black Lives Matter movement (made even more urgent by the police murder of a Latino man just blocks from the Lab).
Having lived in the Bay Area for 20 years, with experience in multiple activist movements, I have seen my share of similar events fall prey to self-congratulatory art exhibits, tepid displays of diversity for its own sake, co-optation by well-meaning but institutional liberal nonprofits and similar organizations, lip service from local politicians, and the difficulty of maintaining and building on whatever alliances might outlast the buildup to what often become one-off meet-ups. This felt different, though, especially in light of other recent actions, like fast food workers and other allies showing up at local campuses forNational Adjunct Walkout Day on February 25, and adjuncts turning out in support of April 15’s national Fight for 15 actions. Students have worked alongside adjuncts and non-unionized staff to build viable networks of campus activism and artists, often saddled with student debt and unable to afford studio space, have lent their energies to supporting their peers caught in the nexus of the art-education-academic-corporate complex.
“Like so many other artists and academics,” said San Francisco Art Institute alum Jessica Tully, “I am inspired by the collective action and by seeing all the creative ways our art teachers are finding to make it feasible to continue to teach.”
It is no longer a stretch to draw connections between adjunct professors and other workers in the service economy. The corporate university model is deeply invested in the notion that treating all of its employees as disposable labor (while at the same time raising student tuitions at an unbelievable rate) can maximize profits. Currently, adjunct professors represent about 80% of all faculty at Bay Area colleges (the number was around 20% in 1970). Many adjuncts work semester-to-semester, contract-to-contract, meaning that we must hustle for work every summer, with no job security, no health benefits, and no institutional support for scholarly research and professional advancement. Many adjuncts have to take on additional work (either at other colleges or beyond academia), and an increasing number (including some full-time professors) now rely on public assistance to supplement their meager wages, meaning that the state is essentially subsidizing private universities. Clearly this is not a model that serves professors or students, much less any vision of liberal arts education most of us value as at least part of our mission.
“As an adjunct at an art college, I’ve seen the power of artistic creative advocacy for workers and social justice inspire, energize, and unite,” said David Skolnick, a senior lecturer at the California College of the Arts. “We are dedicated to improving working and learning conditions at our institution, but, more than that, we want to be part of a much larger movement that recognizes the primacy of the human over the corporation, social justice over profit margin, and democratic community over unaccountable hierarchy.”
For those who teach at arts colleges or in MFA programs — including the San Francisco Art Institute, California College of the Arts, Mills College (where I teach), and St. Mary’s, all of which have in the last year formed adjunct unions with SEIU local 1021 — adjunct professors face the challenge of trying to balance teaching with their own artistic pursuits, a tough equilibrium to maintain even for tenured artists and writers. To be an artist or writer in a vibrant yet expensive place like the Bay Area means grappling with high rents, lingering student debt, and limited free time and energies, all of which can take a toll on one’s artistic practices. Debt-ridden grad students are likewise realizing that for many, the costs of such arts programs far outweigh the supposed professional benefits of advanced degrees, especially as they see so many of their professors living paycheck to paycheck and struggling to find time to pursue their own artistic careers. Earlier this month, for example, the entire first-year class of the University of Southern California’s visual arts MFA programdropped out in protest of cuts, one more sign of the awakening of student, artist, and adjunct activism.
In the current anti-union climate in the US, where membership is down and neoliberal legislation at every level verges on outright union-busting, it is difficult to organize workers into an effective bargaining unit. It is even more difficult with part-time workers in fields such as academia. For a range of reasons, it has long been a challenge to unionize adjuncts. As contingent contract workers, for many of us our connection to where we work can feel tenuous. Some of us are too busy rushing from one campus to another, grading and prepping on the subway journey from one gig to the next, to ever establish relationships with peers and colleagues at any one school. Others may feel that an adjunct position is simply a temporary stop on the way to a tenure-track job, and thus don’t identify as alienated workers. Still others, we have found, tend to think of unions as the realm of the “working class” — more the purview of campus security and janitorial workers than professors and administration members. Despite such skepticism and deep structural challenges, adjuncts across the country have begun to realize that the increasingly corporatized university system does not have their interests in mind. Adjuncts, especially in the arts and humanities, are starting to recognize that the economic and political landscape requires a strong collective response, and adjunct unions have sprung up across the US as a result.
Of course, merely unionizing guarantees little, especially with pro-management laws and regulatory bodies stacked against us. The old saying that a union is only as strong as its members is never truer than when precarious workers such as adjunct professors organize to pressure administrations to bargain in good faith toward meaningful results. Despite the historic victories in the Bay Area for new adjunct unions, in many ways our work has just begun. Sometimes it takes struggle just to achieve a blank notebook or canvas, the basic necessities for creative action; now it is up to us to forge new models of artistic and educational justice, organized collectively against corporate interests and neoliberal cynicism.
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