So, a bit of backstory first. I have an IU credit card through Bank of America, hence the picture to your left. I got it when I was still proud of Indiana University alum. It was where I took, on the Bloomington campus, my bachelor’s degree. I am no longer a proud graduate of IU, a school that while it is growing its sports programmes and spending millions doing so, is slashing Humanities programmes, which historically have been at the heart of the college and university in general and at the heart of IU in particular. IU, which was once upon a time an overgrown liberal arts college and not Purdue, has recently seen its administration, its Trumpian administration (the Trumpian governor of Indiana has packed the Board of Directors with politically and ideologically correct flunkies), decided to end bachelor’s programmes in Art History, American Studies, Cognitive Science, Comparative Literature, Dance, Earth Sciences, Geography, East Asian Studies, Gender Studies, German Studies, Music-Ballet, Religious Studies, Statistics, and several foreign language programmes. They decided to cut master’s programmes in African Studies, Comparative Literature, Communication and Culture, Journalism (they also tried to end the print version of the student newspaper the Indiana Daily Student but backlash, including from money givers like Mark Cuban, forced them to backtrack on this), Statistics, Theatre and Drama, and several foreign language programmes. They decided to eliminate doctoral programmes in African Diaspora Studies, American Studies, Art History, Astrophysics, Chemical Physics, Classical Studies, Comparative Literature, Gender Studies, Public Policy, Theatre and Drama, and several foreign language programmes. The flagship Indiana University campus, in other words, is becoming more and more like, as one Cynthia Fox who took a doctorate at IU and who teaches at SUNY Albany reminded me, more and more like the financially unstable I SUNY Albany, a university I did postgraduate work at. That these programmes, particularly the doctoral programmes, were some of the best in the US and were internationally known and highly regarded seems to have been of little if no consequence to the politically and ideologically correct and corrected Board. What does seem to have been consequential is the fact that these programmes were often critical of the mythhistory that undergirds the delusional populist right’s perceptions of American history. And they should have been and should be because academic and scholarly analysis is not nor should not be cheerleaders for delusional mythhistory myths. Moronicity on the march.
It is moronicity on the march because you simply can't have a world class university with doctoral programmes in the Humanities, Social Sciences, Music, or hard sciences without strong language programmes, something IU has had for years and something IU has been known for and something that has made IU a world class university in the post-World War II era. I suspect the parochial closed minded theocrats on the IU Board probably know this and this is exactly what they want because a world class university breeds empiricism and that breeds the questioning of myths, something the theocrats who run IU and want to return it to what is was in the early 19th century, a seminary, don't want. Obey theocratic authority seems to be their mantra. I hope the Association of American Universities takes a long hard look at what is happening at IU, the making IU theocratic again, and do to IU what they did to the University of Nebraska and Syracuse University, drop them from this organisation of elite American research universities. It would be a perfect match since IU has already dropped significantly in world university rankings, and deservedly so, since I was a student in Bloomington. The IU I went to is not the current plummeting IU, an IU that looks more and more like SUNY Albany (which isn't in the Association) every day save that SUNYA wasn't at the bottom of a recent free speech rankings analysis, that exists today.
But back to the credit card fiasco: Because of these cuts and because of the increasing emphasis on winning sports programmes at IU I returned my diploma to my department, Religious Studies, and I intended never to use the Bank of America IU Credit Card I had again because it benefits the IU Foundation monetarily and financially. It turns out I had to keep it, however. I had to keep it because I became a member at Costco and Costco, you see, has a honey pot deal with Visa, the credit card company, and they only accept Visa at the cash wrap. So, I had to keep my IU card in order to shop easily at Costco because I could not use my American Express card, which is my default credit card. And use my Visa card I did.
In June I paid my bill to the Bank of America. This morning I got up and I discovered that this bill had been paid. Again. Since it had already been paid I wondered why I had been charged twice particularly after I had paid it. After four phone calls, two to my credit union and two to Bank of America (they each blamed the other for the redundant charge), I learned that the Bank of America had recently switched from an old online banking system to a new one. The problem was that the old remained active as well. So while I had paid my bill, something the new system clocked, the old system, which I had the recurring payment option turned on on (it was not on in the new system so I thought I was OK), did not clock the fact that the bill was paid so it charged me again for something I had already paid. Hello Franz Kafka.
I finally got the problem fixed, or, I should say, I hopefully got the problem fixed (stay tuned). According to Bank of America the recurring payment option on the old system has been switched off and my refund has been approved. It took me two hours of pro bono work to get this problem fixed (so much for the time is money mantra). And some wonder why some of us are so angry about the seemingly never ending Sisyphean nature of the brave new digital postmodern world. We are angry because fuck ups like this happen every month if not every week for those of us who avail ourselves of the toys of this brave new digital postmodern world. They are, it turns out much like everything else of importance, a double edged sword. They are very helpful in some ways and they are a royal pain in the arse in others (see above). God I am glad I am not long for this increasingly fucked up digital world, a digital world where fact and fiction mingle on the same level. Moronicity on the march.
Oh I almost forgot, thank you Bank of America for fucking up my credit score...
No comments:
Post a Comment