Today is my second day on a business trip to the great state
of Nebraska, where I am consulting with York College, assisting in building a
museum of ancient history. The project
has been funded by a dear friend of mine who is an example of a very generous
and righteous person who knows that his wealth was meant not only for him, but
that he is the steward of wealth given to him by Providence in order to improve
the world. I am grateful to consider him
a friend and to have the opportunity to be part of this project.
While I have been here, receiving the gentle hospitality of
the Nebraskans, I have come across aspects of the culture that I would never have
imagined. I did already know that home
prices in the Midwest are significantly lower than in the coastal cities I am
usually associated with (L.A. and N.Y. to be specific), but I never knew how
nice a home you could buy for a pittance.
Our host, the kind and generous president of York College, informed me
that one could obtain a decent home here for about $45,000. During our evening drive around the Town of
York, and its environs this evening, the largest and most beautiful house we
saw he estimated at around $300,000. One
cannot even get into a “decent” house in the most run-down areas of L.A. for
one tenth of the price they are here!
Even after the housing bubble burst, home ownership is still way out of
reach for most average earners. Why? Because we have been convinced that that’s
what they’re worth, and someone is willing to pay it. In Nebraska, the same house, with much more
property, in a safer area, with a slower paced lifestyle, in an area with a
significantly lower cost of living—valued at one tenth the amount of its L.A.
counterpart, just because of the popularity of the latter’s location. Sounds like a big con game to me.
And that’s just what I’d like to focus on in this post: con
games. When I asked Dr. Eckman how many
of the 35 faculty employed at York College were full-time, and how many were
part-time adjuncts, he replied that about 31 of them were full-time. “Very few of them are part-time,” he replied. “It’s difficult for us to find qualified
adjuncts here.” He then mentioned one or
two who worked for them, among them a medical doctor and another, a physicist,
who had just passed away. The impression
I got was that they were “traditional adjuncts”, experts in their fields who
were eligible to teach part-time to expand the students’ horizons and to give
them knowledge that they would not otherwise obtain from full-time
faculty. I told him that I found this
admirable. This reminded me of something
pointed out to me elsewhere: that often
it is difficult for smaller colleges in rural or remote areas to fill their
faculty with adjuncts, as more urban colleges do—and particularly more
established and financially stable
ones. It is these larger schools, in
areas with a larger population of adjuncts to draw from, that seem to
deliberately manufacture a cover story—crying poverty, or a need to be “more
flexible”—and exploit the local population of scholars, who are more numerous
in that area and are more susceptible to big business practices. In more rural areas, they cannot afford to be
that dishonest and, perhaps, they realize that it is neither in their best
interest in the long run, nor is it a just and admirable practice.
So, a school like York, with only 500 students, can afford
to keep a faculty to student ratio of approximately 14 to 1 and not rely
excessively and exploitatively upon adjunct labor? Good for them! So, if they can do it, why can’t larger
schools, like USC or even my own employer, Loyola Marymount University? This, of course, made me think about the
current campaign to unionize the adjunct faculty at LMU, of which I am among of
the leadership. Perhaps York would be an
example of a place that did not need a union.
They appear to treat their faculty well.
Of course, I am an outsider, and I cannot speak about what I do not know
first-hand. But with the resources they
have, certainly more limited than LMU or USC, they keep their focus where it
needs to be: student learning conditions.
And as many of us in this growing national movement to reform higher
education and stop “adjunctification” of higher education have said, “Faculty
working conditions are student learning conditions.” Perhaps our big city schools can learn
something from these small town, Midwestern colleges. But my eye-opening experience did not stop
there.
Not only does the Town of York have an extremely low crime
rate, and affordable housing, but Dr. Eckman noted numerous instances in which
the students regularly volunteer their time to better the lives of the
residents, not least of which were their yearly excursions to paint the houses
of the local elderly and infirm. And a
number of Christian sojourners (retired missionaries and preachers) annually
volunteer their time to paint and do other service at the school. This, dear reader, is Christianity at its
best. A Christian school that sets a
positive example to the community and students, and really takes care of its
most susceptible.
But what’s more is that I learned that the great state of
Nebraska has banned corporate agriculture.
Any large farms must be farmed by families, not big “agri-business”. At first, I thought I misheard Dr.
Eckman. Could it be? A statistically Republican state putting limits
on big business?! The only down side is
that many farmers are forced to farm plots two and three times the size of those
farmed by earlier generations—in order to make ends meet—on account of the cost
of the machinery involved in modern farming operations. But to combat this, there are things called
Farmers’ Cooperatives. As a big city Los
Angeleno (neither by birth or by choice, of course—transplanted New Yorker that
I am), these are phenomena that I would know nothing about. But the president explained to me that these
cooperatives, which are popular with some modern farmers, help to empower the
individual farmers by sticking together with their neighbors and negotiating better
selling prices for their produce, and better buying prices for their equipment
and supplies. Gee, that sounds a lot like
a union! Another thing that is
traditionally rejected by conservative Republican platforms.
So here we are, “enlightened” (yes, those are scare-quotes) academics
of the big cities, being told by bloated university administrations that we don’t
“need” a union; that we can deal directly with the administration; that they
cannot afford to pay us living wages; that they need to employ so many adjuncts
to teach core courses in order to maintain “flexibility”; that this is just the
way things are and we shouldn’t have gone into teaching if we wanted to earn a
living wage. And the worst of it is that
their rhetoricians keep telling us that we don’t need “some third party” coming
in and telling us what to do—as if the union were a third party. Is the farmers’ cooperative a “third party”? No. It
is the collaboration of a group of farmers, joining forces to ensure proper
treatment in the face of bigger, profit-driven corporations—entities that Andrew
Jackson repeatedly warned us about at the inception of the phenomenon; entities
that are only as compassionate as the robber barons running them. And it is the lifeline of many smaller
farmers. So, is a teacher’s union a
third party? No more than a farmers’ cooperative
is.
Maybe these big, urban universities could learn a lesson
from their small town cousins. Maybe
these rural farming communities can teach us something after all about the dignity
of human beings and about community and justice. Thank you, Dr. Eckman, for teaching me about
the dignity and the example of small town life.
Maybe if they paid us a living wage, and treated us with the dignity with
which these small town colleges are treating their faculty, our urban schools
would not currently be living in fear of having a union.
