Dogmatics and Demagogic Studies in the Kingdom of Florida: All Hail the Power of Ronnie DeSantis's Name...

 

Hey Ronnie baby. I am writing to you in order to offer my services to your majesty. I can, should you deign to hire me, develop programmes in uncritical dogmatic studies to be taught in your majesty's colleges and universities in the Kingdom of Florida. I can also teach, face-to-face or online, these courses to the millions in your majesty's college and university students who are anxiously awaiting them with sweaty alms and baited forked tongue breath.

As part of my application for this position I have drawn up for your consideration, your majesty, a few tentative courses that might be offered in the faculty of Dogmatic and Demagogic Studies. The only prerequisite for Uncritical Dogmatics courses, of course, will be membership, as evidenced by a membership card, in one of the Kingdom's White right-wing evangelical churches, the beloved official Church of the Kingdom. It is assumed that virtually all students in the Kingdom's halls of higher education will have one of these just as many in the USSR joined the Communist Party. 

Dogmatics and Demagoguery 1001: Boris and Natasha: Introduction to the Evils of Commieism (4)

Dogmatics and Demagoguery 1002: She's Got the Devil in Her Heart: Satan is the Author of Critical Race Theory (3)

Dogmatics and Demagoguery 1003: Beelzebub's Fibs: The Social Sciences Are the Spawn of Satan (3)

Dogmatics and Demagoguery 1004: God's History: America the Good (3)
 

Dogmatics and Demagoguery 2001: All Hail the Power of Jeezus's Name: The Sanctity and Holiness of the Free Market (3)
 

Dogmatics and Demagoguery 3001: God's Holy Men: Capitalist Saints from Adam Smith to Donnie "Tangholio" Drumpf (4)

Dogmatics and Demagoguery 3002: Onward White Christian Soldiers: There is Only One Religion, One Christianity, and One TANGHOLIO in God's Chosen Land (3)

Dogmatics and Demagoguery 3003: The Meek Shall Inherit the House: Women in God's Chosen Land (3)

Dogmatics and Demagoguery 3004: The Eye of the Trumpeedle: Being a Man in God's Kingdom (3)

 

Dogmatics and Demagoguery 4001: Abel was White: The Goodness and Holiness of the White Man's Burden (4)

Dogmatics and Demagoguery 4002: Royal Guns and Royal Butter: America is God's Chosen Nation (3)

Dogmatics and Demagoguery 4003: Here's Jeezus: Christian Zionism, The Only Good Jews, and the End Times (3)

 

Dogmatics and Demagoguery 4003: Hail Caesar (3)

This class will focus on saintly Dogmatist/Demagogue political and economic leaders such as Donnie Boy Trump and Ronnie Goy Boy DeSantis

 

Dogmatics and Demagoguery 4004: Any Means For God's End: Lying for the Lord (3)

Dogmatics and Demagoguery 4999: Capstone Proseminar in Uncritical Dogmatics (4)
All undergraduate students majoring in D&D will be required to take this course before graduation. Students taking this proseminar will be required to read that classic of systematic dogmatism, the Capitalist Catechism. Before students can pass this class, they must demonstrate mastery of this holy catechism by writing the holy mantras on the blackboard one hundred times. Proctors, of course, will assure that the phrases of the holy catechism are written on the board in selectively literalist fashion.

Students majoring in Dogmatics on the undergraduate level can earn a BS degree. At some point in the future, we should consider offering a master's course in uncritical dogmatics. Master's students, should this programme be initiated, can earn a Master of BS.

Hail Caesar.

Contact Information:
The Royal Department of Dogmatic and Demagogic Studies

61666 Royal Court

Tallahassee, Kingdom of Florida, CSA
by appointment of His Royal Majesty, Ron XXXIII
Freiheit in Ordnung und Konformität

Musings on Fear, Loathing, and Redundancy in Academia

 

The First of June, it turns out, was a transformational moment in my life, particularly in my work life. On that Monday I noticed that I no longer had access to the faculty web page or the faculty employment portal at the college at which I work.

There were, it is clear in retrospect, forebodings of redundancy several months back. Earlier this year, I received an update from my weak as water union that some adjuncts, of which I am one, were concerned that some of their fall 2021 classes were being "hidden" by the college administration. Today I learned that one of those classes being "held back" was one of my classes, an elective I teach periodically at the college.

The fact that one of my classes was being "held back" combined with the fact that I, for the first time that I can remember since 2010, the year I started working at the current college at which I teach, had no access to the faculty web page and the employment portal, made it crystal clear to me that I had been made redundant even though I had received no communique to that effect from anyone in the college administration or from my department.

To understand why I have been made redundant we need to understand the changing economics, politics, and culture of academia since Ronald Reagan. The American colleges and universities with hale and hearty liberal arts faculties I knew in my college youth are no more. They are no more for several reasons. College costs, for instance, have risen consistently and dramatically since the neoliberal turn in the core nation world beginning in the late 1970s. Some have argued that the reason for the increase in the cost of college is due to decreased state support for once relatively inexpensive state universities, some of which were even free. One study found that between 2008 and 2017 states cut funding for state colleges and universities by 16% in real terms. In 2007 state appropriations for full-time students when adjusted for inflation was $8489 in 2007; in 2017 it was $7642. In 2007 students and parents paid about 33% of state college and university operating budgets; they paid around 50% of state college and university operating budgets in 2017.

Government support for colleges and universities has decreased in other core countries across the world as well. For decades post-secondary institutions in Canada received more than half of their income from federal and provincial governments. However, according to Statistics Canada, it declined to 47 per cent in the 2017-18 academic year. Public funding of colleges and universities in Canada peaked in 2010-11 at $22 billion. It fell to $21 billion in 2016-17. Today the Canadian federal government primarily supports research in its colleges and universities. As the twenty-first century began the bulk of Canadian college and university support for operating and capital costs come from the provinces but provincial support for Canadian colleges is now declining as well. Between 2010 and 2020 provincial funding for colleges and universities fell by about 15 per cent.

Not everyone has concurred with the proposition that state support for American colleges and universities has declined and led to periodic crises in higher educational organisations. In an analysis of the data on spending on American state colleges and universities, Paul Campos found, or so he claimed, that state appropriations for state colleges and universities had increased. Appropriations reached, Campos concluded, when they are adjusted for inflation, a record high of $86.6 billion dollars in 2009. State support for colleges and universities, Campos notes, declined because of the Great Recession of 2008 but rose again after that recession to $81 billion dollars, not quite at the level of state support for colleges in 2009 at least in absolute terms.

So, what, according to Campos, is really driving up the cost of an education at state colleges and universities. It is, claims Campos, an increase in the number of administrative personnel or bureaucrats at state universities. Department of Education data indicates that administrative positions at colleges and universities grew by 60 percent between 1993 and 2009. This increase in the numbers of administrative personnel was, according to an analysis by Bloomberg, 10 times the rate of growth of tenured faculty positions. An analysis by a professor at California Polytechnic University, Pomona, found that, while the total number of full-time faculty members in the California State University system grew from 11,614 to 12,019 between 1975 and 2008, the total number of administrators grew from 3,800 to 12,183, a 221 percent increase.

The number of bureaucrats and the increasing salaries they are paid has not only put a strain on American higher education. One study found that in Australia the salaries of vice-chancellors, the chairperson of the governing body of the university, was 2.9 times that of lecturers at 37 of Australia’s public universities—most of Australia’s universities are public—in 1975. By 2017 vice chancellor salaries at Australia’s public universities were 16 times that of lecturers, teachers of the second highest rank. The same study found that in the UK vice-chancellors, the executive head of British universities, made 4.9 pounds for every 1 pound a lecturer earned in 2007 and 5.7 pounds for every pound a lecturer, teachers of the second highest rank, earned in 2015.

In the era of real or perceived decline of state support several things have happened in colleges and universities including an increase in student fees, the use of student fees to leverage deficit spending, and the increasing hiring of part-time faculty or adjuncts. According to one study the number of non-tenure track faculty at American universities has increased by between 45 percent and 62 percent at public bachelor's granting institutions, by 52 to 60 percent at private bachelor's degree granting colleges and universities, by 44 to 50 percent at public research universities, and by 80 to 83 percent in American community colleges. I give you the lumpen academitariat. I am one of these lumpen adjuncts or contingent faculty. I am one of these contingent faculty who can be hired and fired at will and who gets very limited support from the union of which I am a member despite their rhetoric that they are working heartily on our behalf.

It is not surprising that the neoliberal university run by neoliberal managerial types increasingly uses adjuncts as a cost cutting measure and a profit raising, in the form of administrative salaries, scheme. It is also not surprising that in periods of busts, which seem to be coming ever more faster and furious these days, contingent faculty are expendable. After all, those increasing number of administrative bureaucrats running America's increasingly corporate higher educational institutions aren't likely to cut their jobs even though many of them are simply doing the bullshit jobs of which David Graeber spoke and noted were a central component of managerial capitalism, a capitalism that would not need to be managed if Adam Smith was right.

So, what now? As I mentioned, I was offered one class by the department though I was "promised", if that is the word for it since administrative bureaucrats use every semantic trick in the book to make "promises" contingent particularly for contingent faculty and ultimately not promises at all, two classes. The bureaucrats never opened the 200 level second class, an elective, I was scheduled to teach and as a consequence I have no way of telling how many people would have signed up for this class even if they could have. Quite a slick neoliberal administrative trick, n'est-ce pas. What is crystal clear is that it is simply not feasible for me to drive three hours three times a week at around $40 to $50 dollars a gallon of petrol a week to teach one class. And by teaching only one class I will not meet the standard for health insurance. The bureaucrats, with the agreement of the union requires that I teach two classes to get health insurance.  As I noted, I am a member of a union, United University Professors, UUP, so I thought about filing an official complaint about how the suits treated me recently but as I have learned many times previously doing anything through the union is a waste of time since the union is united, well kind of, behind full-time professors and is weak as water when it comes to those who really run universities, administrative bureaucrats,

My only option seems to be to do what I have done: I have officially retired from the college and university system I have worked at since 2006. Both my pension and my health insurance are, thankfully at this point, "vested". The former may be only a pittance, but something is better than nothing as the proverb notes. As for the latter, I hope I can afford it. After all, we in the US have the most labyrinthian, bureaucratic, and bizarre health care system in the core Western world.

What is particularly interesting to me, as I end this post, is that nobody really seems to care that one of the things my college is not doing with the millions in aid it is receiving from the state and the federal government is helping me and others like me by making sure that we can teach two classes at meagre remuneration and benefits. Ain't that America? Ain't that neoliberalism? Ain't that neoliberal higher education with its vocational education for jobs and profits mantra and model? Ain't that education for economic, political, and cultural conformity? Amen.

revised July 2021

 

 

Musings on Film Auteurism and Classical Music

 

I have long thought that the best analogy for the theory of cinematic auteurism is that of the composer, orchestra, and conductor of classical music. The score of a Mahler symphony, of course, is akin to a film script by a writer. The various players of the orchestra are akin to the technicians and crafts people who collaborate to make a film. The conductor is akin to a film director. He or she takes the score, conducts or directs the various players playing the various instruments (including the human voice) noted in the score, and produces a performance of a musical work just as a director conducts or directs the various forces that go into making a film.

Not all film directors or classical conductors, of course, are equally auteurs. On one level, there are the Leonard Bernstein's and the Herbert von Karajan's, to take two examples, who bring something of their own personalities and their understandings of composers to their conducting. They are akin to the Alfred Hitchcock's and Ingmar Bergman's of the film world. On another level, there are the mostly anonymous conductors who really don't bring much of a personality to conducting or directing. They are the Archie Mayo's of the classical music world.

Nor should we forget that interpretation is not absent from the conducting or directing of a piece of classical music. Though composers often annotate their scripts with tempo markings, for instance, there remains a degree of ambiguity about how to interpret those annotations and whether they actually "work" in practise that every conductor must make. I give you Beethoven's metronome markings. A conductor has to make a choice among various possible interpretations of a musical score in collaboration with the other musicians just as a film director has to make choices, in collaboration with others, about the mise-en-scene of a film.

Finally, it is worth noting that some conductors and orchestras specialise in periods and composers just as some film directors specialise in certain genres. Trevor Pinnock and his orchestra, The English Concert, for instance, specialise in baroque and early classical. Conductor Bernard Haitink was a fine Mahlerian while Simon Rattle is an excellent Szymanowski conductor. Very few conductors can actually do everyone in every period well.

The Books of My Life: Swedish Cinema

 

It can be somewhat tricky writing about national cinema. On the one hand many scholars or analysts of national cinemas look for the distinctives or exceptionalisms associated with the national cinemas they are focusing on. Peter Cowie in his monograph Swedish Cinema (London: Zwemmer and New York: Barnes, 1966), for instance, argues that Swedish cinema, specifically the Swedish cinema of auteurist masterpieces, betrays a homogeneity of style and substance. For Cowie, Swedish auteurist cinema, has tended to portray humans as both beautiful and cruel, a beauty and cruelty that parallels the beauty and cruelty of the Swedish environment itself. Swedish auteurist cinema, argues Cowie, was also, thanks to its Protestant Lutheran environment, fatalistic, a cinema of psychological conflict, a cinema of conflict between asceticism, an asceticism that often became sado-masochistic, and pleasure.

On the other hand, there is a tendency among those writing on national cinemas to explore the influences on the national cinema that they are focusing on. Cowie, for instance, notes the impact of German cinematic expressionism, French cinematic poetic realism, and American cinema with its genre based mass cinema on the Swedish cinema. From a global perspective, in other words, Swedish cinema and Swedish religious culture doesn't look that exceptional when explored more broadly. After all, all the core nations of the world and particularly those of Western Europe and European settler societies like the United States have all been impacted by modernity with its individualism and its puritanical and de-puritanical tendencies.

Cowie's book is a good workmanlike introduction to Swedish cinema. It doesn't, however, address this paradox of exceptionalism and globalism in the history of cinema directly. Cowie briefly explores the history of Swedish cinema from its beginnings in the early twentieth century to the 1960s. Some may find, however, that its focus on the cinema of auteurs, on the cinema of Swedish auteurs Victor Sjostrom, Mauritz Stiller, Alf Sjoberg, and Ingmar Bergman, the section of which makes up about half of the book, and auteurist documentarists, problematic. One might, for instance, argue that such an approach gives a stilted picture of the Swedish cinema and particularly of its popular comedies and operettas, of its mass cinema, which Cowie argues, were quite prominent in the 1930s and one presumes popular afterwards given the role successful films played in funding Swedish filmmaking particularly after the 1950s. Additionally, since Cowie doesn't really tell us much about this, we can only speculate about the role the exhibition of foreign films, particularly those of Hollywood, played in the Swedish market. Finally, Cowie's focus on the distinctives of Swedish cinema, despite mentioning the foreign influences on Swedish auteurist cinema, underplays the post-World War I and post-World War II angst that fed into the cinemas of Germany, France, and the United States, an angst that would give rise to a fatalism, existentialism, the revolt against the teleologies of modernity, and the death of god movement all across the Western world, including in Sweden.