Syndicate and Hague

Stop sending me special offers.  Stop sending me those damned “checks” to use.  Just stop it.

I just spent 45 minutes ripping up your mail - and why did I have to be so careful?  Because you, Citibank, have to put my full name and address in about 10 different places in the mailings.  Because you, Capital One, insist on sending me checks that some random person could just write up and charge the hell out of my account.  Because every time I buy a shredder it breaks within a month and so I’ve given up and taken to tearing up the bits of paper with my hands because, despite the fears over identity theft online, it’s your own recycling/garbage that poses the biggest danger.

Every week, I get five (or so) new offers for cards or “special” offers from my current company offering me the opportunity to spend money I don’t have on impulsive crap I don’t need.

I hate you.  You are exploitative and predatory and suck in the needy and greedy, preying on people’s desires and desperation.  You are plunderers, pushing consumption as the norm and portraying yourselves as our security nets when we’re in need.  Of course, anyone who carries a balance with you could see the ground shift beneath their feet in a moment if you decide to arbitrarily increase rates or change fees or alter minimum payments.

Your leaders make out like the bandits they are - even when your companies fail, they land safely in their multimillion dollar Central Park apartments with their golden parachutes.  They make more from their failures than most of us will accumulate in our entire lifetimes.

Stop sending me mail.  Stop trying to convince me that impulsive/compulsive buying is acceptable.  You can try to blame individuals for making bad decisions and getting into trouble, but the fact is that you and the legislators who allow you to ravage all of us have created the culture in which you are a solution for our crises; orchestrated the financial collapse that hasn’t affected you at all; and systematized your consolidation of power - of rate adjustments and fees and whatnot - while we have nothing.

You totally and completely suck.

Also, I will never carry a balance with you.  Never.

Also, also: stop sending me mail.

You may not know who Jessica Valenti is, but it’s never too late to catch up on a strong, smart feminist voice. I bring her up because of her recent marriage and how well she has spoken about the complicated feelings she’s had about the process and institution, as well as her intentionality about constructing a wedding and a marriage that reflects her philosophies and life.

Back in January, when she announced her engagement on her blog, she accompanied the post titled “Does the personal always have to be political? (And can’t it ever be private?)” with this e-card:

It was around the same time that Megan and I told people about our engagement and dealt with a smaller scale and less vicious set of questions (asked both of each other and by others), so I found myself relating to her in a lot of ways. Why did we want to participate in the institution of marriage? What does a feminist (in Valenti’s case) or queer/feminist (in our case) marriage look like? How do you redefine something that (traditionally and still) is so interlaced with male dominance and religious control?

Thankfully, we didn’t have gossip columns and publications like Playboy weighing in on the merits of our relationship or framing our decision as a “feminist-finally-gets-hitched” story like the NY Times did. (By the way, NYT: seriously?? You could have written about so many more interesting aspects of the marriage/decisions made about it and you chose the easy and kind of anti-feminist route. But I shouldn’t expect more depth from the section that usually profiles rich, ivy leaguers with famous parents.)

Valenti just wrote a new post called Well, I’m damn sure never getting married again and it pains me that she had to write it. She thought into constructing what it meant not only to be married, but to get married, and I think that is what you would expect from someone with a track record of critical thought and political engagement.

And let me tell you, it is hard to deconstruct marriage and the cultural weight embedded in it to reconstruct it to fit your values. As Valenti said:

When I wrote about Andrew and I planning a wedding, I wasn’t doing so to make some grand statement about what feminists should do when they get married. Or to suggest that my wedding was going to be The Most Feminist Wedding Ever. I wrote about it as an individual, as a person, who was trying to negotiate her beliefs with a traditionally sexist institution and the consumerist party-planning that surrounds weddings.

…

We wanted to make the wedding representative of the institution we’d like marriage to be, and I think we did a good job. Does any of this change the fact that marriage is a historically sexist institution or make it okay that millions of people are denied the right to be married? Of course not. But it made the celebration one that made sense to us, one that re-imagined what marriage as an institution should be about - love, equal partnership and community. (And seriously, to the some of the more conservative relatives at our wedding, hearing these sort of things at a wedding absolutely made an impact.)

Love, equal partnership, and community: that is how Megan and I felt about it.

I can’t speak for Valenti or any other feminists/lgbt folks who get married, but - for us - everything was put on the table. We broke down what things signified in general, what they signified to us, and what we really wanted rather than what may be culturally imposed. For instance: the rings. Personally, I have somewhat critical feelings about wedding rings - engagement rings in particular. As engagement rings are traditionally only given to the woman, I find them to be a societal symbol of purchase (our language supports that - an engaged woman is “off the market”) and that is problematic for me. Wedding rings have a similar problem for me as the last thing I want to be is “owned” by anyone else. And as lovely as Megan is, I don’t want to be owned by her (and vice versa).

But rings are pretty. And I wanted one. I was so happy to be marrying Megan (and am so happy to be married to her), and the idea of having something that she gave to me that I would have with me all the time made me happy. So we decided: no engagement rings, but we got really pretty and unique rings made for us that would give us each a symbol of our love and a reflection of how we’re linked that we would carry with us every day. Then, when friends gave us the stones for the rings, they also became a way in which our community supported us.

Does wanting rings without wanting the baggage of ownership - does redefining that part of weddings - make us bad feminists? I don’t think so. And I’m sure if we’d wanted to badly enough that we could have redefined the role of the engagement ring as well. Having the capacity to think critically about institutions and practices doesn’t mean that we have to swear off everything associated with those things. My perspective is that the process of critique and intentionality underlies the core of the philosophy of “the personal is political.” The decisions we make with that kind of reflection are invariably going to be truer to ourselves and our values.

Megan and I had a hard time writing a ceremony in part because every element of it was analyzed - but because of that it was also completely appropriate to us. We wrote it in Provincetown two days before the wedding and it was perfect. It was about love, respect, individuality, change, support, trust, adventure, discovery, and commitment. It was about how she makes me a better person (and vice versa). (She is so awesome.)

What I hope is that Valenti can ignore the haters to an extent and be happy that she and her husband got to put the kind of effort and intentionality into defining their wedding and marriage that they did, and know that the kind of critical thought she expressed in public was not wasted.

I spent much of the latter part of last week doing one of the things I do best (and enjoy most): being a thorn in the side of lockstep thinking. Even though I’m too much of a speck to truly change anything in this instance, the least I can do is challenge the assumptions people put forth as “common sense” (or even “commonly agreed upon”).

In my experience, it is very easy in marketing meeting type situations for people to blindly acquire and use the language presented as their baseline. What I mean by this is that, if the people running a meeting use a word like “spin,” the people in the meeting will think in terms of spin. This happens for a variety of reasons: people want to impress those who have more power and therefore don’t question underlying premises of a discussion; people are afraid of losing their jobs so they play along even if they’re annoyed; or people - when faced with contributing to something they disagree with - hold their tongues rather than speak up. The reluctance to speak up is sensible. It’s self-protection, but it’s just as likely a result of the speed with which and the manner in which people construct thoughts and arguments. Some people need to take time to dissect and construct and are marvelous thinkers - but aren’t quick thinkers.

Anyway, the series of discussions was about something of a pretty broad scope. It’s something I consider both potentially incredibly beneficial and dangerous simultaneously and my hunch is that it will be used in both ways, which I can’t do anything about. The most I can do is try to help construct and frame positive uses. But that’s not what I’m talking about here (if I tried to sum up everything I said, we’d be looking at an even more long-winded blog post than usual).

What I want to talk about is how we develop a lexicon and how destructive a lexicon can be once it is assimilated into regular speech. In this instance, the term “spin” came up (as in: how to “spin” the U in a positive light), as did the term “loyalty” (as in: how do we create loyalty to the U - implicitly, how do we create loyalty to the brand of the U?)

Let’s take on the word “spin” first, because it’s easier to deconstruct. In fact, Jon Stewart did it quite well several years ago when he deconstructed what “Spin Alley” (the place the cable news people cut to when discussing a debate) actually means during his infamous Crossfire appearance:

You go to spin alley, the place called spin alley. Now, don’t you think that, for people watching at home, that’s kind of a drag, that you’re literally walking to a place called deception lane?

…

But what I believe is, they’re not making honest arguments. So what they’re doing is, in their mind, the ends justify the means.

Honesty is the core here. In “spin alley” you’re talking about dishonest argument, in “spinning the U” you’re talking about a dishonest presentation of the University. Nothing is inherently positive. No one is going to have exclusively positive interactions with anything ever. So the question is this: are you going to try to artificially force positivity or are you going to spend your time and money creating experiences and opportunities that people actually feel happy to be a part of?

For instance, if I say that the faculty of my PhD program areas of Culture & Teaching and Learning Technologies are freakin awesome, that isn’t spin. That is genuine sentiment based on a positive and ongoing experience. Creating positive experiences and painting positive pictures are very, very different things.

You get the picture. Let’s move on to the concept of loyalty.

In the context of this discussion, we’re essentially talking about getting people affiliated with the U to be loyal to the U. And here is where the problem of the lexicon comes in. If there is a group and those leading a session ask a question that is (paraphrased) “how do we increase people’s loyalty to the U?” then the group’s job is to respond to that without actually questioning the question. You respond with ways in which to increase loyalty, rather than to ask whether loyalty is what we should be working towards.

Since we’re talking broad scope here, we’re talking students, alums, external folks, faculty, staff…can anyone see the issue of using a term like loyalty with all its connotations (faithfulness, obedience, devotion) in regard to people whose economic and professional fates are tied to the institution? Additionally, the notion that we ought to be loyal to an institution rather than committed to a collective purpose strikes me as terribly hollow. If the U is merely a shell or a brand, then commitment is meaningless. It’s the U’s purpose that people are committed to, not a tagline or an institutional brand.

Of course, purpose is a tricky thing: it actually needs to be actively developed and worked at. A brand can coast on its merits and has sale value. A purpose is a moral imperative; veiling that moral imperative in branding language allows people to forget the purpose exists, it allows people to pursue the game of marketing for its own end rather than the higher purpose they are supposed to be serving.

Loyalty, however, if induced - the concept of “raving fans” was discussed - is a blind, emotional, and arbitrary tie. What does it mean to be a fan of the Vikings who paints his/her face purple? Who cares! They come to the game, buy the jersey, drink beer in the stands…they give us money.

That is the source of my aggravation. The thing that twists me in knots. If the goal is loyalty - a word chosen in a winnowing process of meeting after meeting after meeting - then it appears we want nothing more than consumers. We’ll provide them as much as the bare minimum they require in order to come back and purchase something another day.

And this is why language is important. If, instead of asking how to create “raving fans,” we asked questions about facilitating and building community, and how to maintain our own authenticity so that the actual experiences people have with us are positive/beneficial (rather than just spun to be so), we would be asking far better questions and getting entirely different answers.

(Now, one could say that my professors/TAs back in undergrad at the U did a pretty damn good job of helping me develop my critical reasoning skills, but none of these discussions are really about quality - just perception - so it’s kind of irrelevant.)

This isn’t really a movie review.

I sometimes wonder why sooo many crappy awful movies for dudes get made. And then I came across statistics - via Traction - that in 2008:

• Women comprised only 16% of all directors, executive producers, writers, cinematographers, and editors working on the top 250 domestic grossing films (a decline of 3% since 2001 and of 1% since 2007).
• Only 9% of directors were women - no change since 1998
• 22% of the films released in 2008 employed no women directors, executive producers, producers, writers, cinematographers, or editors. No films failed to employ a man in at least one of these roles.
• 90% of the films had no female directors.
• 43% of the films had no female producers.
• 79% of the films had no female editors.
• 96% of the films had no female cinematographers.

If you take a moment to think about what that means - that the vision behind the movies, how things are interpreted, how things are portrayed, how our attention is directed, how a story is cut, how a story is told, who the protagonist is, who we should care about, who we should forgive, all of it is predominantly controlled by the male perspective - it’s a bit overwhelming.

It seems beneficial to remind ourselves that as self-congratulatory as we can be about women’s progress, we started at such a position of disadvantage that we’re still not even close.  Actually, there was an article in Jezebel back in August that got this topic stewing around in my head.

In an article about an NY Times scan of the big studio schedules by Michael Cieply, they highlight one of his paragraphs trying to explain the disproportionate dominance of male directors.

In one respect, homogeneity among its film directors might actually help Hollywood in a business sense. Studio films, year in and year out, continue to pull in crowds worldwide at least in part because they look, sound and feel like what has gone before.

What can you say to that? I’ve been under the impression that Hollywood has actually not been pulling in the box office numbers they need to in order to sustain their business model, but whatever. It also completely ignores how movies influence our culture at large, and how alienating it is for people to rarely see accurate representations of their lives in film. That was one theme that came up in The Celluloid Closet in regard to queer representation in film - that there were almost no representations of real queer lives in film (this was in 1995ish).

So when we went to Whip It last night, I was thinking about all of this and paying attention to how the movie showed women’s bodies, lives, sexualities, and humor in a female-directed, female-written film. I’m not saying that the movie was some groundbreaking work of feminism - it was a fluffy, feel-good, entertaining movie - but the representation of these different aspects that I noted were actually significantly different from other mainstream films I’ve seen recently.

• The skating scenes, of which there were many, were striking in that they focused on the competition, athleticism, brutality, and sexiness of roller derby - as opposed to focusing just on the sexiness and turning the female characters into playboy versions of roller derby girls
• It is really nice to see the quirky, female character as protagonist - the character that gets to develop and discover aspects of herself and become a more complete person - rather than as the girlfriend of and foil for male protagonist development
• Speaking of that, it’s also nice that though the romantic relationship had an impact on the main character, it wasn’t the core of the female protagonist’s transformation. I hate how hugely rare that is, but it’s refreshing to see
• I just really liked the range of female characters, the ways the different ages of the female characters contributed to friendships and relationships and their interactions with each other

What I want: more movies with female protagonists, written/directed by women. Let’s just balance things out.

Megan and I were coming home from an evening at Spyhouse (me desperately writing a paper for a conference, a sad excuse for a paper; Megan reading) and caught the end of The Story on our glorious Minnesota Public Radio. This is what it was about:

Jessica Zichichi and her husband Sal have held onto good jobs - their problem is the housing market.

Jess and Sal were living in a small house in Cape Cod that they loved. Then Sal took a job in South Carolina. It was 2006 and they figured they could easily sell the house. In the meantime, they’d live on their 33-foot boat.

Then the bottom fell out of the housing market. Jess and Sal were stuck living on the boat while they rented their house to a nightmare tenant and tried to rustle up enough funds to build a one-room barn to live in. And then Jess got pregnant. She talks with Dick about some of the good that’s come from her family’s ordeal.

With all the awfulness of our own buying(?) a short sale ordeal overwhelming most aspects of our lives at the moment, hearing Jess’s story was like a moment of light. I think this may have been a rerun because I vaguely remember the story, and I remember originally thinking “oh how terrible!!” - but this time it just delighted us. We laughed and gave each other big smiles every time Jess’s story intersected with ours. Just knowing someone else was going through things as ridiculous as ours - and more so, at least we’re not living on a boat, right? - made our transient life a little less lonely and tragic.

It’s not perspective really, more of a relief at shared troubles. I guess that’s perspective in a way.

All I know is that MPR brings me so much joy so frequently. And I love listening to it with Megan.

***

By the way, I haven’t even talked about how we got married. But it was so fantastic. I’ve started a few posts about it, but things have been so nuts with the house stuff that I haven’t even had the level of concentration necessary to finish writing the posts and do the wedding justice.

So they did it. The Regents, sans two, voted to destroy the Regents Scholarship. There are not enough expletives in the world to express how I’m feeling right now.

Here’s the thing, though. It’s our own damn fault.

Let me repeat that: it’s our own damn fault.

One of the Regents who voted against the proposal cited phone calls she’d gotten as one reason she would not vote to destroy the scholarship. Public outcry does work and if 2,300 people take classes every year, 4,000 workers should have been at that rally. Do you really think they would have passed it if McNamara plaza had been filled with U employees and the TV reporters who would have followed a crowd like that? I don’t.

Maybe we’ve just gotten so used to getting screwed that we don’t see the point of making an issue of it anymore. Cut pay? Sure. At least I have a job. But what happens when they come for more? How willing are you to have your compensation package sucked dry so that we can keep executive salaries at a “freeze” and not a “cut”?

If you weren’t there and didn’t make phone calls:
You all just took a cut and you didn’t even try to fight it. Those of you who make money and don’t need it let your lowest paid workers take a cut and you didn’t even try to fight it.

Protest works. But it only works when people show up. Sadly, those who proposed anti-employee solutions were able to waltz off with more of our money because we as a whole didn’t bother to try.

And that pisses me off. And depresses me.

So where the hell am I going to find an extra 3 grand a year? Anyone? I guess I’ll start applying for scholarships that could have gone to other students. I was actually not doing that because I felt I didn’t need the money as badly. That’s changed now, though…

One of the great luxuries of having Wednesdays off for these few weeks in which I do not have to do homework for 3 classes is that I can sit and really listen to podcasts of shows I enjoy. Today was the most recent episode of Radiolab, “Diagnosis.”

I dig Radiolab. Actually, I just dig science shows in which they look at things from a variety of angles. Radiolab in particular, however, often leaves me in a state of rehashing and thinking about at least one element of the show.

This week, it was the part of the show on SIDS and how the doctors initially discovered a problem and diagnosed it with terrible consequences.

So this is the knowledge I came away from the show with: back in the early part of the 20th century, they started realizing that SIDS was a thing. A few thousand babies, otherwise healthy, would just die while sleeping and no one could figure it out. Stymied, the doctors decided to do what they do, and research (autopsy) the babies who died to see if there was some part of the anatomy that was different. What they discovered was that all these babies had enlarged thymuses, which they thought may be pressing on the trachea and suffocating them at night.

Score, right? Well. Their solution was to irradiate the throats of babies if parents were concerned about SIDS, which resulted in tens of thousands of deaths of people who got thyroid cancer. Oops. Sidenote: I guess radiation was all the rage back then. People could get x-rays of their feet at shoe stores and Marie Curie was plunging her own arms into radioactive things. That didn’t go so well for her, you know, though we gained a lot of knowledge from it.

That stuff is interesting in and of itself, but the show goes on to talk about why all these babies had enlarged thymuses. (You’re totally trying to guess right now, I know. I was too.)

They didn’t.

Going back to the old days of grave-robbing, you know that’s how our early doctors got bodies to study anatomy, the well-off folks started finding ways of warding off the grave-robbers. Complicated caskets, vaults, etc. The grave-robbers were stuck digging up poor people buried in sacks a few inches under the ground in paupers’ graves. Eventually, in a number of countries, any unclaimed poor person who died was automatically donated to science–essentially codifying the existing practice.

So take that knowledge (our doctors way back then were only looking at the anatomies of the poor) and combine it with the knowledge that nutritional deprivation and stress physically messes you up, and combine that with the knowledge that constant stress shrinks the thymus…and voila! Those babies didn’t have enlarged thymuses, they were the first healthy thymuses the doctors had ever seen.

Huh.

It’s no secret (or maybe it is for you, I don’t know) that a lot of our medical knowledge was built on the backs of the poor. A lot of it was also built on the back of slaves — horrible, unspeakable things were done to slaves in the name of medicine. If you want to hear about it (and I’m telling you, listening to this made me cry), SPH had Harriet A. Washington speaking on Medical Apartheid this past year and it was intense.

The irony of this for me was that because science so abused the poor, middle/upper-income children died. Because the burden of discovery was not shared across class lines (some lives and deaths are more sacred), doctors couldn’t diagnose problems that affected children regardless of class.

I was already a little twisted over the article that ran in the Star Tribune about U of MN’s president Bob Bruininks this weekend. Then I looked at my student account for the coming school year and nearly had a heart attack. Tuition went up $353/semester ($706 a year) for graduate students, making annual tuition alone over $10,000 per year. Tuition for undergraduates went up to $550/year and is pushing $10,000 per year.

I know I’ve talked about this before, but the sticker shock of my upcoming degree combined with an uncomfortably cheerleading Strib article and the sadness I have looking at my undergraduate alma mater (and employer and place where I’m getting my PhD) become further and further out of reach for average Minnesotans is pretty profound.

The article was already sour to me when it stated that “Bruininks also would not back down when clerical workers walked off the job a year ago, and the strike fell apart.” Summing up what happened last year in those few words that favored the administration was inaccurate at best. The pay scales at the University as we strive ever further towards that “top three” designation are, as in corporate America, increasingly skewed. Faculty in certain schools make incredible salaries. Whether or not the salaries are deserved/necessary is a point of ambivalence for me–I see both the pros and cons–but to essentially put the workers at the University “in their place” while lavishing senior administrators and plenty of faculty with six figure incomes and assorted perks is, in my opinion, simply immoral.

Anyone who works in academia long enough knows that the quest for “top three” status isn’t about the University’s undergraduate education. It’s about securing grants, having top notch graduate programs, doing groundbreaking research…and all of those are good things, in my opinion. However, there is that pesky reality that we are also supposed to educate thousands of new undergraduate students every year.

The naive undergrads who commented on the Strib article think this quest for glory has been done for them, but that’s just not in evidence. We still rely heavily on graduate students and adjuncts to handle undergraduate courses and I don’t see that changing.

As for the idea that the U should be an elite institution and the people who cannot get in (nevermind that the article didn’t exactly address students who can get in, but cannot see how to finance such a hefty price tag), I’m again ambivalent. If you want the U to be the “pinnacle” of public university education in Minnesota, I’m not necessarily opposed to that. But we’d better damn well get our priorities straight. The U can be a fantastic school and an affordable school, if we decide that it should be.

While I whine a bit about the amount I’m going to have to put in for my graduate degree, I’m not actually very broken up about graduate tuition rates. Graduate school is nice, it certainly gets you places a BA/BS doesn’t, it tends to bump your pay up, but it’s just not necessary that masses of Minnesotans get masters degrees and PhDs.

However, pinnacle or not, the kids of Minnesota should have access to the U. They shouldn’t be priced out of an education here. The people of this state have a vested interest in an educated workforce and our student populations should have affordable access to everything from the community colleges to the state universities to the University. It’s really that simple.

Not to be crass, but seriously, all y’all libertarians and Republicans can go screw yourselves. Live on an island where you don’t care about the society you live in. Tear each other to pieces in some Lord of the Flies fantasyland where the strong survive and blah blah blah.

This is a note I might otherwise post on my Twitter feed. A 140 character WTF, but this is serious.

First, I’ll tell you why I’m beyond outraged. The Star Tribune wrote today that police and fire calls may start to be billed to the recipients of said services in Duluth.

Let me quote from the article:

Duluth city administrators are considering charging fees to property owners and drivers for police and fire responses.

City spokesman Jeff Papas says the amount of the fees haven’t been set yet.

If the Duluth City Council agrees to charge fees, it would then set an amount. The council could vote July 28.

Papas says the city is looking into whether it can charge different fees for residents and nonresidents. If so, fire and vehicle extraction fees would apply to everyone, but only nonresidents would pay to have accidents investigated.

Papas says the fees could bring in an extra $100,000 per year for the city facing a $4.5 million deficit.

Screed ahead.

If our economy/society is in such shambles that we can’t provide basic rescue and protection services to ourselves based on a shared pool of resources, we have a problem.

And here is the problem we face in general. Since the 1980s, certain members of our society have been reaping the tremendous benefits of deregulation, while society itself is cracking under the weight of economic and structural disrepair that has happened with the abandonment of checks and balances on the free market.

Laissez faire economic policy is a dumb idea. The fairy tale that what is good for “the market” is good for the society is preposterous. The current crisis with foreclosures is a fantastic example. “The market” drove up prices and encouraged greedy and corrupt mortgage brokers to get home buyers/refinancers to sign on with loans they had no perceivable way of paying off.

Why would they do this? Huge, huge commission. The bigger the “sale,” the bigger the haul. Lack of oversight and regulation allowed this to continue on a grand scale. There were home buyers/refinancers who made greedy/bad decisions, but if you read the personal stories that have been reported, some were just outright deceived.

Conned. Conned because a lot of people were making a lot of money.

And what happens to the people who really profited on this? They lose a tiny percentage of their ghastly wealth? That’s hardly punishment for hundreds of thousands of people losing their homes and the destruction that wreaks on neighborhoods.

But forget that. We could talk about deregulation of mining, all those cranes that keep crashing down and killing people, the airline industry.

Deregulation=no oversight. No oversight=no one to call you out on fraud.

And now we’re in a situation where a city in this great state, and this is a great state, is considering charging for basic rescue and protection.

Minnesota is not perfect, but we used to value our communities. We knew that in order to have a functional state with a good quality of life, you had to invest in the society. We are responsible for the quality of our communities and neighborhoods.

If there’s no money, raise taxes. Forget this “fee-based” Republican crap. We are a society. We stand together or else we will fall apart. Hardly any of us could afford as a single household to create the kind of life that we have when we combine our resources. It is beyond my personal comprehension that people can ignore this simple fact.

I could scream right now, I’m so frustrated. Our physical infrastructure is disintegrating, and now our rescue/protection infrastructure is something we might have to consider the cost of the charges against the benefits of getting help.

Taxes. Taxes. Taxes. Raise the damned income tax. Taxes are your obligation to the society in which you live.

Know what’s worse than taxes? A society where no one is accountable. Make people pay for rescue/protection services and some will opt out. You’d better hope those people don’t live next door to you if it happens.

This is a very quick hit on the first part of a two part series in the Minnesota Daily on the survey of what students value and what they perceive the University as valuing and the difference between them.

Students at the University of Minnesota currently pay $3,750 per semester in tuition, $324.10 in student fees, and a $500 “University fee.” This brings the grand total of one semester of education at a land grant, state-funded university to a whopping $4574.10 per semester.

That is $9,148.20 per year before books and course-related expenses.

As a Minnesotan, I find this abhorrent. Tuition has nearly doubled since I graduated in 1999 and, as I’m sure you all know, incomes have not.

Strategic planning or not, big grant funding for research or not, it is the responsibility of the University to provide quality undergraduate education to our students and there is a pervasive problem at all institutions of higher education where intelligent, fantastic researchers are expected to teach courses but not expected to develop competency (to say nothing of expertise) in pedagogy (teaching).

This is a long-running problem. Teaching doesn’t bring in money, research does. The University needs money……and thus the cycle continues. Research gets priority over teaching.

The administration can spin things however they want. I went to the University as an undergraduate, so did many of my friends, we have all come to the same conclusions the undergraduates who were surveyed did.