Chiding People to be Decent

Read this article about the pay of adjunct professors in comparison to tenured and tenure-track professors.

Not that positive.

I read the comments.

Less positivity.  Some lamented how academia was becoming a playground only for the socially elite. Some decried market logic.

What bothers me is that the brainless construct called market, as if it was the Oracle of Delphi, is simply and without any criticism accepted to be the rightful force that drives ultimately all value judgements and decisions in all areas including what counts as valuable profession and what contributes to society's progress. 

I'll be honest: In my personal value system, anthropology, human sciences, ecological sciences rank quite high, right there with earth science and physics (my own training), but also including non-neocon macro-economics, while I see little use in all those many law schools and business schools. Sorry, Jenifer.  

What is new information? The neocons tell us that the market should decide in which direction all economic activity, including learning, research, and teaching should be directed. The market (model) is a big stochastic machine that operates as the "invisible hand" which assigns value by trial and error, and controls the flow of economic activity by allocating money here and pulling it out there. The word free market is misleading because it is constraint to not go against the interests of few owners and members of the so-called meritocracy. But especially with regards to academic research, learning and discovery of new knowledge, most people are lead to accept the idea that freedom means to give the market all control about the direction we are supposed to be searching for new information and improvements in all aspects of living. It means that we put the control to a blind, barely understood "thing out there" which can give rise to all kinds of value judgments about professions. So for example, anthropology may be considered more or less a worthless market glut, while what law schools and business schools produce is seen as The information to tap the sources of wealth production. (Easy - it serves those in control). The problem is, this system is by principle bound to have tunnel vision. If all the sensors of a complex system (which includes our minds) are biased and focused only towards preselected potential sources of new information, and accept from those only what it expects according to its own biases, then what it gains as new information is very likely to be actually just old information, which is no information at all. That system begins to optimize its efficiency to the death. As they like to say: "The market has already accounted for it" (what it perceives that is). In other words, it is by design that we are just drifting and may not even know when we go over the cliff - While a few anthropologists may be trying very hard to prevent this from happening.

Some were chiding the article writer for her career choice as an Anthropologist.

A commenter named Bulldog710 had this to say about the freshly made Ph.D Anthropologist article writer:

Bottom line: (for example) There are 10,000 PhDs with degrees in Anthropology. There are only 1,000 professorships in the U.S. available, and all those positions are filled with tenured PhDs.

Poor Sarah feels defrauded because, as the 10,000 + 1 with a doctorate in Anthropology, she didn't get offered the Red Carpet at Harvard like she feels she deserves. So now, in her world view, the entire educational system in America is headed for the sewer.
I suggest Sarah grow up first, then after a few years of maturity, try again. Such incredible pity pot.

There were a lot more comments that this particular poster made, but this one was one of the most vitriolic because of the attack he/she laid upon a person he/she only apparently knows through means of this article.  The comment just inflated the article writer with characteristics such as entitlement and immaturity.

The arrogance was answered.

Bottom line: Despite the fact that more and more students are going to college and therefore there is more demand for classes and resources, the fact that university bureaucracies are growing exponentially with the upper ranks getting larger and larger salaries, and the fact that the expectations for research output has not changed, it apparently somehow totally makes sense that the number of tenured professor positions in the USA have been steadily decreasing while cheap adjunct positions have become more common. 

Yes, let the system arbitrarily take away gainful employment opportunities proportionate to the years of unpaid work and student loan debt you've gone through to get the job you've always wanted and were willing to work for, in favor of shackling you into "permanently temporary" adjunct positions without any job security or benefits simply because they can get away with extracting the work out of you without the oh so terribly inconvenient price tag of paying you an appropriate living wage. 

We are supposed to live in a world where a small handful of extremely greedy people hoard money hand over fist, while the rest of us should grovel and beg and just be grateful when one of these people occasionally tosses one of us a bone.  Don't dare step out of line and point out that things could work better another way, or that there are better ways to distribute wages.

Bless you, Bulldog710, for unleashing a completely vicious and unfounded character assassination toward someone you've never met simply because she is pointing out very real and completely arbitrary inequities in a system that are really devastating some peoples lives unnecessarily.  Putting effort into fixing things and making things work better (or like they're supposed to) is for bratty little children; instead, lets be mature adults and mindlessly defend a broken system by conveniently finding a way to place blame on people arbitrarily screwed over because that's the path of least resistance and most morally simplistic.  Roll over and just accept your fate because that's what's convenient for the worldview of the Bulldog710's of the world, who are far too preoccupied with their reprehensibly lazy and unfounded misanthropy to be bothered to extend any effort beyond that of a banana slug.