Robert Enke, the goaltender for Hannover 96 (who currently hover in the middle of the German Bundesliga standings) and a potential member of next year’s German World Cup team, died the other day. His death was apparently a suicide.

“At 1825 (1725GMT) he was run over by a regional express train running between Hamburg and Bremen,” said police spokesman Stefan Wittke. “The train was travelling at the speed of 160-kph.”The player’s friend and consultant Joerg Neblung told reporters: “I can confirm this is a case of suicide. He took his own life just before six (pm).

Enke lost a child in 2006 and has left behind a wife and eight month-old daughter.

Most Americans have never heard of Enke, but they probably are familiar with Andre Agassi, a former #1 world-ranked tennis player who won eight Grand Slam events (in the process becoming one of only three men in the open era to win all four Slam events during his career). In his new autobiography Agassi describes how he became so despondent at the state of his life – which also included being married to Brooke Shields, one of Hollywood’s legendary beauties – that he turned to crystal meth.

At the core of Agassi’s despair: “I really hated tennis.”

Agassi has given at least a couple of interviews in recent days, including one that some of you may have seen on 60 Minutes (he also talked with Rick Reilly of ESPN). As this Gawker post notes, the Katie Couric conversation had to have been beyond humiliating.

I suppose a lot of us look at men like Agassi and Enke and have a hard time fathoming their discontent. After all, what are the things regular people worry about? Money? Finding love? Recognition, success, professional validation? How many men out there could have looked at Agassi’s life in 1997, when things really bottomed out, and concluded that obscene wealth, tremendous talent, ubiquitous fame, a career where you get paid to play a fucking game and a wife who was one of the most stunningly fabulous women alive … well, that all just seemed a little hollow. What if I inject radiator fluid into my aorta? Maybe that’ll give life some purpose. But as he told Couric, at the time he couldn’t imagine how this drug could make him feel any worse than he already did.

I don’t know a lot about Enke’s life, but on the surface of things it probably looked pretty good compared to what millions of Joe Sixpacks trudge off to every morning. Still, he threw himself in front of a train. And Agassi risked everything for something, anything, that would help him escape a life he hated, no matter how grand it may have looked to the rest of us.

Of course, these two cases are far from perfect parallels. For one, Enke took his own life and Agassi survived. For another, friends and family members say that Enke had long struggled with depression, whereas Agassi’s issues seem less clinical and more bound up with being forced into a career that he hated (Enke reportedly loved soccer). Uli Hesse-Lichtenberger notes that Enke’s struggle was hardly the first of its kind, rattling off a litany of European footballers who, like Enke, couldn’t seem to find happiness in what most would regard as a dream life. The same is certainly true for athletes in all other pro sports – he also points to the case of Boston Red Sox centerfielder Jimmy Piersall, for example, whose “autobiography ‘Fear Strikes Out,’ [was] later made into a Hollywood movie.”

In fact, we might go so far as to argue that these two cases have nothing to do with one another. Perhaps one is a case of clinical illness, pure and simple, while the other speaks more to a cultural pathology surrounding how children are herded into sports (or acting, or when they reach college, medicine, or the law, or accounting, or whatever their parents have decided is best for them). If so, then let’s pause here to simply acknowledge the obvious: fame and wealth don’t make one immune to mental illness.

The Agassi case, though – I have to admit that I was surprised at my reaction. I’m pretty jaded about the world of pro sports and for a long time I wasn’t much of an Agassi fan. And I’ve never had much patience for rich jocks singing pitiful me songs. I know that money doesn’t guarantee happiness, but I’ve always wished for a little more perspective from those who are blessed to be free of the concerns that plague so many of us: Yes, your life isn’t perfect, but my child is sick and we can’t afford health insurance, so would you please have enough self-awareness to go somewhere and shut the fuck up?

Listening to Agassi tell his story, though, I was struck by his honesty, his humility, by his absolute refusal to blame others. More than anything, I was shocked by how very … normal his plight seemed. He clearly is aware of the apparent absurdity, of the contradiction, and he’s embarrassed by it. He’s not asking for sympathy – he’s simply telling a humiliating story because he must. And the result – here’s a rich guy telling a story that we actually can empathize with in a human way that transcends class and circumstance. With Agassi, money can’t buy happiness becomes something more than a cliché that the have-nots use to rationalize their own despair.

Tennis was something that he had been compelled to do because his father (an Iranian immigrant) saw it as a ticket up the ladder, and as a result he liked his job about as much as millions of disenchanted people in the US like theirs. It’s just something they do – each morning they get up and trudge off to serve the necessity of paying the bills.

If I were to sneer at Agassi for being unhappy, what would I do when I realized that my life looks as affluent to billions of people around the world as his does to me? What do I do? I sit in a nice office and write, and meet with people about business issues, and in general get paid well above the national income average to use my brain. I live in a modest house – except that it’s mansion compared to what most people have.

Still, I’ve spent way too many years hating my job the same way Andre hated tennis. A few years back I spent several months working in a position that I loathed. I joke that those nine months probably took five years off my life, except I’m not really joking. After I left, I realized that for the first time in months I could breathe. The stress I had been carrying around was making me physically ill, and even to this day I can hardly think about the experience without feeling a slight surge of anxious adrenaline.

Not long ago I wrote that “reality is making us sick, and fantasy can’t cure us.” In that essay I talked about the book Affluenza, which I’d just completed. Toward the end I said this:

So here’s my theory/hypothesis/question. We’re a hollow nation, a society that provides nearly all of us with rampant access to more material goods than we know what to do with. But we cannot find happiness in the material because there is not happiness in it. On the contrary – it’s a system that’s rigged to feed us a shiny, pretty lie that hollows us out some more, all the while whispering that only more of the lie will make us happy.

Is this something like the lie that drove Andre Agassi’s father to enslave his son to tennis? Is it like the lies of so many people I’ve known in my life who wanted to teach, perhaps, but did the “sensible” thing and became accountants? Or the lies that led how many of my classmates to become lawyers or doctors or MBAs because that’s what their fathers had been?

I have multiple sig files that turn up at the bottom of the e-mails I send out. One of my favorites – it has probably appeared in more than 100,000 of my e-mails through the years, and maybe more – is a quote from Joseph Campbell. It goes like this:

You may have success in life, but then just think of it – what kind of life was it? What good was it – you’ve never done the thing you wanted to do in all your life. I always tell my students, go where your body and soul want to go. When you have the feeling, then stay with it, and don’t let anyone throw you off.

Campbell is talking about living an authentic life, and I’m glad to see that Andre Agassi is, finally, doing just that. Or so it seems, from watching an exposé on television.

Like many of my fellow citizens, it’s probably safe to say that I am not living an authentic life. Not yet. When I get up in the morning there are things I want to do, things that would make me far happier, but I don’t do them. My discontent hasn’t led me to crystal meth, nor is it going to, but it does lead me to thinking about a day several years ago when I stood in l’Accademia in Florence overawed by The David. I’ve never shaken the sense that, among other things, Michaelangelo was making a point about living an authentic life. David is staring off in the distance, sizing up the Goliath of his age, and he is not afraid. He does not hate the life he is living. He does not hate the moment he is in. In fact, he seems to be looking forward to the battle in front of him.

He seems possessed by a calm resolve, by that feeling that Campbell is talking about and the confidence that comes with knowing that he will not thrown off of it.

Agassi’s Wikipedia entry notes that “he is the founder of the Andre Agassi Charitable Foundation, which has raised over $60 million for at-risk children in Southern Nevada. In 2001, the Foundation opened the Andre Agassi College Preparatory Academy in Las Vegas, a K-12 public charter school for at-risk children.” Wow – a dropout investing a medium-sized fortune in helping poor kids get an education.

There’s a lesson in here somewhere, and it’s too complex to trivialize it by tying it up into a neat platitude. At the core, though, lies the need to examine the relationship between our humanity and the material world that so often eats away at it.

I’m grateful to Andre Agassi for telling his story. I hope we can all learn from it, even if the story itself strikes us as so very unlikely…

Image Credits: The Brisbane Times, TheOffside.com and EagleVision Productions.

“Wendell Berry is the Sargeant York charging unnatural odds across our no-man’s-land of ecology. Conveying the same limber innocence of young Gary Cooper, Wendell advances on the current crop of Krauts armed with naught but his pen and his mythic ridgerunner righteousness. One after the other he picks them off, from the flying bridges of their pleasure boats as they roar through his native Kentucky rivers, from beneath the hard hats in the Hazard county strip mines, from the swivel chairs in the Pentagon where they weigh the various ways to wage war on all forms of enemy life beyond the end of their own friendly chin. He’s a crackshot essayist and, for those given to capture, a genial and captivating poet. He boasts a formidable arsenal of novels, speeches, articles, stories and poems from his outpost in one of the world’s most ravaged battlefields where he writes the good fight and tends his family and his honeybees. Consider him an ally.”

The thing is, Kesey said this in 1971.

That was nearly forty years ago. And I realized, after reading another Berry essay collection a couple of weeks ago (in this case, The Way of Ignorance and Other Essays), that Berry has been pounding away at the same themes for at least that long. And nothing that he has expressed concerns, not to mention deep dismay, about—the increasing power of agribusiness, our increased disconnection from the land, the abandonment of local economies and communities, our collective disregard of the concept of stewardship—has gotten better. In fact, one could argue that everything of concern to Berry has gotten worse. And this is tragic, because current trends, particularly in agriculture, but also in the relentless suburbanization of American life, where no one actually really knows how to do anything, are probably unsustainable. The result will be, well, who knows what, but it might not be pleasant. And who will have the kind of wisdom and local knowledge that is central to Berry’s worldview then?

Berry is fond of throwing out nuggets like the following:

Nobody has a right to destroy anything, and everybody has an obligation to defend as much as he or she possibly can. But sooner or later you’ll have to choose. You can’t defend everything, even though everybody has an obligation to be as aware as possible, and as effective as possible, in preserving the things that need to be preserved everywhere. But I’ve argued over and over again that the fullest responsibility has to be exercised at home, where you have some chance to come to a competent and just understanding of what’s involved, and where you have some chance of being really effective.

And:

Rome destroyed itself by undervaluing the country people, too.

And:

My approach to education would be like my approach to everything else. I’d change the standard. I would make the standard that of community health rather than the career of the student. You see, if you make the standard the health of the community, that would change everything. Once you begin to ask what would be the best thing for our community, what’s the best thing that we can do here for our community, you can’t rule out any kind of knowledge. You need to know everything you possibly can know. So, once you raise that standard of the health of the community, all the departmental walls fall down, because you can no longer feel that it’s safe not to know something. And then you begin to see that these supposedly discreet and separate disciplines, these “specializations,” aren’t separate at all, but are connected. And of course our mistakes, over and over again, show us what the connections are, or show us that connections exist.

And:

There is no time in history, since white occupation began in America, that any sane and thoughtful person would want to go back to, because that history so far has been unsatisfactory. It has been unsatisfactory for the simple reason that we haven’t produced stable communities well adapted to their places.

What I’m talking about in my work is the hope that it might be possible to produce stable, locally adapted communities in America, even though we haven’t done it. The idea of a healthy community is an indispensable measure, just as the idea of a healthy child, if you’re a parent, is an indispensable measure. You can’t operate without it.

Berry is the philosopher of the local and what, specifically, being local entails. America has inflicted a number of wounds on itself the past several decades in the name of “free markets,” still clinging to the myth that there is actually such a thing. Berry isn’t much of a fan of these, actually. What he is a fan of is the dignity of work (remember that?), and the notion that we should take care of ourselves, particularly how we care for the land that supports us. And that we should have local knowledge–about the land, of course, but also about how to do the things we need to do to occupy the land–how to maintain and sustain it in particular. Well, at a time when externalities are catching up with us rapidly in any number of areas (global warming being the most obvious), we really need to pay more attention to what Berry is saying. And that means a return to the local. Berry has a number of mantras—the most recent is “Eat responsibly.” And by this means not just know what your food is, and whether it’s good for you or not—but where it comes from, how it was produced, under what conditions, and subsidized by whom? Sounds easy, but in modern America, and increasingly here in the UK, this is getting harder and harder to do.

I’ve been reading Berry for decades now, and his place in modern American thought is still a bit of a mystery. He’s written one of the best American novels of the century (A Place on Earth) and a number of volumes of pretty good poetry (particularly Farming: A Hand Book). He honed his craft at the Creative Writing Program at Stanford University, where he hung out with Kesey, Robert Stone, and Larry McMurtry. Most importantly, he has produced a series of essays over the years that stand as a testament to sound judgment. In many ways, conservative judgment as well—because Berry wants to conserve things.

This has led to many fun and enlightening exchanges within the conservative and libertarian blogging community. When did Berry, the arch-Luddite opponent of modern agribusiness, militarism and word processors, become a crunchy-conservative icon? Pretty recently, judging by some of the commentary I see occasionally on blogs like the ones cited above. And hardly a week goes by over at Front Porch Republic that someone doesn’t make a specific reference to Berry. I think this is great.

And where are the liberals on Berry? Generally, not to be found, which is a pity. Have liberals become so entwined on the wrong side of the globalization debate that they’ve lost all perspective? I’m way over-generalizing here, of course, but still, I seldom see anyone on the Democratic side speaking up for localism. Instead, we get Larry Summers and Bob Rubin, and Obama, for all his many virtues, still behaving like a farm state senator. But if liberals really want to pursue a more just society, the place to do it as at the local level. The far right understands this better than the left—hence the attacks on ACORN, which is essentially local political action. Look, you want better schools? Run for the school board. You want better food? Get on the planning board and make sure that the last local farmland isn’t being ploughed under for yet another housing development. You want better communities? Run for the city council, or whatever it is you’ve got. That Think Globally, Act Locally bumper sticker that we seldom see any more had it about right.

As Bill Kauffman has noted, “Among the tragedies of contemporary politics is that Wendell Berry, as a man of place, has no place in a national political discussion that is framed by Gannett and Clear Channel.” This may be changing. For one thing, Berry is still writing, and more and more people keep reading. I don’t think there’s a single book in his back catalogue that has ever gone out of print—pretty impressive for a writing career than spans over four decades. For another, Berry, bless his heart, just won’t shut up. Here’s Berry and long time co-author Wes Jackson in The New York Times earlier this year:

Agriculture has too often involved an insupportable abuse and waste of soil, ever since the first farmers took away the soil-saving cover and roots of perennial plants. Civilizations have destroyed themselves by destroying their farmland. This irremediable loss, never enough noticed, has been made worse by the huge monocultures and continuous soil-exposure of the agriculture we now practice.

To the problem of soil loss, the industrialization of agriculture has added pollution by toxic chemicals, now universally present in our farmlands and streams. Some of this toxicity is associated with the widely acclaimed method of minimum tillage. We should not poison our soils to save them.

Industrial agricultural has made our food supply entirely dependent on fossil fuels and, by substituting technological “solutions” for human work and care, has virtually destroyed the cultures of husbandry (imperfect as they may have been) once indigenous to family farms and farming neighborhoods.

Clearly, our present ways of agriculture are not sustainable, and so our food supply is not sustainable. We must restore ecological health to our agricultural landscapes, as well as economic and cultural stability to our rural communities.

For 50 or 60 years, we have let ourselves believe that as long as we have money we will have food. That is a mistake. If we continue our offenses against the land and the labor by which we are fed, the food supply will decline, and we will have a problem far more complex than the failure of our paper economy. The government will bring forth no food by providing hundreds of billions of dollars to the agribusiness corporations.

And then the kicker—we don’t get a bunch of starry-eyed idealism, but a bunch of necessary, practical and achievable measures to take to redress these problems:

Any restorations will require, above all else, a substantial increase in the acreages of perennial plants. The most immediately practicable way of doing this is to go back to crop rotations that include hay, pasture and grazing animals.

But a more radical response is necessary if we are to keep eating and preserve our land at the same time. In fact, research in Canada, Australia, China and the United States over the last 30 years suggests that perennialization of the major grain crops like wheat, rice, sorghum and sunflowers can be developed in the foreseeable future. By increasing the use of mixtures of grain-bearing perennials, we can better protect the soil and substantially reduce greenhouse gases, fossil-fuel use and toxic pollution.

Carbon sequestration would increase, and the husbandry of water and soil nutrients would become much more efficient. And with an increase in the use of perennial plants and grazing animals would come more employment opportunities in agriculture — provided, of course, that farmers would be paid justly for their work and their goods.

Thoughtful farmers and consumers everywhere are already making many necessary changes in the production and marketing of food. But we also need a national agricultural policy that is based upon ecological principles. We need a 50-year farm bill that addresses forthrightly the problems of soil loss and degradation, toxic pollution, fossil-fuel dependency and the destruction of rural communities.

No wonder most Reagan conservatives can’t stand the guy. A 50-year farm bill? But that may be how long it takes to re-capture the kind of localism that will provide us with a sustainable agricultural system. But Russell Kirk would probably take a look around at the mess we’ve made, and agree.

Did I mention Berry is a poet as well? The Mad Farmer poems in particular are worth a look. Let’s close with “The Farmer and the Sea” (initially published in Farming: A Hand Book):

The sea always arriving,
hissing in pebbles, is breaking
its edge where the landsman
squats on his rock. The dark
of the earth is familiar to him,
close mystery of his source
and end, always flowering
in the light and always
fading. But the dark of the sea
is perfect and strange, the absence of any place, immensity on the loose.
Still, he sees it as another
keeper of he land, caretaker
shaking the earth, breaking it, clicking the pieces, but somewhere
holding deep fields yet to rise,
shedding its richness on them
silently as snow, keeper and maker
of places wholly dark. And in him
Something dark applauds.

To learn more, this is a pretty good place to start.

Part of my job as a journalism professor is to recruit students. Because I was a journalist, I’m interested in finding bright, hard-working young men and women who’d like to follow the calling of the public service mission of journalism. (I remain optimistic, perhaps foolishly.)

Parents of prospective students, of course, routinely ask: “What’s your record on job placement?” That I can tell them, based on surveys of our grads six months after matriculation. (And it’s an excellent record, too.)

But here’s the question I dread:

My daughter says she wants to be a journalist. Even if her financial aid package is half your $35,000 per year cost — and rising at 5 percent a year — and despite what parents can pay, she may end up with more than $30,000 or $40,000 in student loans. How long will it take for her on an entry-level journalist’s salary to recover her investment?

Surveys of journalism school grads from recent years say salaries in the mid-20s are customary. Entry-level print journalists earn a little less (in some cases, a lot less, as my graduates tell me); PR, advertising and some broadcast jobs earn more. That parent envisions an ROI on the family’s investment in the daughter’s education at three to five years or more. That’s at a private school; presumably, a public school grad would fare better.

If that young woman is bright, she’ll do her homework. She’ll ask me before sending in her enrollent deposit for the names of recent grads who landed daily print jobs after graduation. After getting their permission, I’ll give them to her. They’ll tell her this:

They love being journalists. They love telling a good story. But they detest working 60 or 70 hours, nights and weekends, for 40 hours’ pay. They detest the unpaid furloughs imposed by corporate managers looking to cut costs. Their raises, if profferred, lag significantly behind inflation. Because of numerous rounds of buyouts and layoffs, fewer older, experienced reporters and editors are available (and willing) to serve as mentors. Young journos are tired of seeing assignments that serve more as fluff than substance. They thought, as journalists, that they could make a difference. They are discovering that the current structure of the industry prevents that, frustrating them. Their health-care plans suck. And they’re tired of providing their own reporter’s notebooks.

That prospective student may still attend my journalism program — but if she’s keenly aware of her ROI, she may apply her time, treasure and talent to mastering the skills of a journalist only to apply them to other avenues of communication that pay more. She’ll learn to observe, record, analyze, organize and present. But she’ll do that concocting advertising and PR campaigns instead of digging up the dirt at city hall that unpaid “volunteer” amateurs and bloggers don’t do well or at all. That’s because those stories — the mundane but necessary stuff of holding government accountable — don’t drive traffic to blogs.

Yes, I paint a bleak picture. Yes, it’s overdrawn. But scratch journalists in their mid-20s, either at print jobs or small-market broadcast stations, and you’ll hear all these threads. And yes, there are a number of emerging avenues for distribution of journalists’ work operated by laid-off journos, foundations, non-profits and for-profit, online-only startups. There are places she can work as a journalist. But then there’s that ROI calculation: Making a difference vs. paying the bills and student loans.

I wonder where the journalists will come from who will be around 10 to 20 years from now to cover the financial funeral of Social Security, the continuing debate over health-care reform, the attempt by President Hillary Clinton to amend the constitution to allow her a third term and the still unfolding drama of Brett Favre’s 15th “retirement” from the Toronto Argonauts.

Thousands of journalists at daily papers have lost their jobs in just the past few years. Generally, they’ve been the older, more experienced journalists. Bean counters figure they can hire two, maybe three cub reporters for the dough they pay an experienced journo making Guild scale and excellent benefits after 25 years. And that’s if they hire at all.

Studies show that the nation’s journalism schools are cranking out about 12,000 graduates every year. But is the trend line of those who wish a journalism career with a public-service aura ascending or descending?

Where will the next generation of skilled, committed journalists come from if the perceived ROI of a journalism education is so dismal?

To quote from a recent BBC article:

Lee Ki-Churl, a corporation official, said he expected Tanzanians to benefit from the deal. “Some African countries export fruit and import fruit juice, or export olives and import olive oil, simply because their past colonialists did not teach them how to process food,” he told the AFP news agency. “We plan to set up an education centre for Tanzanian farmers in the food-processing zone in order to transfer agricultural know-how and irrigation expertise to them.”

I think it is both patronising and ignorant to assume that Africans don’t farm the way modern western farms operate because they are uneducated.  This almost seems to imply that Africans are too stupid to help themselves.

I’m not a purist when it comes to the “rationalism” of markets (the theory that every price includes all available information to reflect that price), but I do believe that in relatively unsophisticated African markets there are good reasons why farmers do not farm or invest in productive capacity:  weak rule of law, ineffective property rights, high taxes, bribery and corruption all add up to ensure that the cost exceeds the benefit of investment.

Anthony Mills, a soil scientist at the University of Stellenbosch contacted me regarding the difficulty of conducting development in Africa.  “The Zambian land tenure system is particularly problematic.  By law the land is owned by the President.  In practice it is owned by the chiefs.  The land is consequently probably even further from private ownership than in most developing countries.”

Yet, without any due acknowledgment of the political and legal environment standing in the way of growth and development, international projects duly waste cash on major interventions.  In 2004, the UN launched the Millennium Development Villages project in an effort to demonstrate how the goals for the Millennium Development Goals could be realised.

Promises of the Millennium

Millennium Promise was co-founded by the economist Jeffrey Sachs and the philanthropist Ray Chambers. The project work of the Millennium Villages are overseen by a Scientific Council composed of leading scientific and development authorities at the UN Millennium Project and The Earth Institute at Columbia University, both of which are headed by Sachs.

The project is a miserable example of the patronising and objectionable way in which development in Africa is imposed, as if like manna from a benevolent West.

The project hasn’t “failed” in the way a business would fail.  Jeffrey Sachs hasn’t been forced to live in a homeless shelter, and the villages themselves aren’t derelict.  My concerns have to do with the nature of the promises, and of the results.  My analysis is based using only their published information and claims (on their sites: http://www.unmillenniumproject.org/ and http://www.millenniumvillages.org/).

Their objectives are an overwhelming mish-mash of wants and desires:

“In its first 18 months, the MVP’s five main objectives were to: (i) Provide universal access and free distribution of long-lasting, insecticide treated bed nets to fight malaria; (ii) Achieve significant increases in staple crop yields; (iii) Ensure universal access to functioning health clinics; (iv) Increase primary school enrollments; and (v) Provide community access to improved and year-round water for consumption. In addition, the MVP emphasized cross-cutting interventions focused on addressing gender inequality; on community mobilization, participation and leadership; and on infrastructure for transport, energy, and information and communications technologies (ICT).”

“The Millennium Villages seek to end extreme poverty by working with the poorest of the poor, village by village throughout Africa, in partnership with governments and other committed stakeholders, providing affordable and science-based solutions to help people lift themselves out of extreme poverty.”

Ending extreme poverty is a known quantity.  Numerous countries have done it (from South Korea to Brazil) and what is required mostly boils down to accountable government and rule of law, plus sound economic principles premised on enforceable property rights.

So much for the background.  Let’s look at the viability of these projects themselves.

The region chosen

“Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Mali, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Tanzania and Uganda.”

According to a quick check, the bottom 20% earn roughly $350 to $450 per annum in this region.  I’m being generous here, since the MDP aims to work with the absolute poorest which the UN usually defines as people earning less than $1/day.

“Between 1990 and 2001, the number of people in sub-Saharan Africa living on less than $1 a day rose from 227 million to 313 million, and the poverty rate rose from 45 percent to 46 percent. Sub-Saharan Africa has the highest rate of undernourishment in the world, with one-third of the population below the minimum level of nourishment.”

This implies a total of 62 – 63,000 villages (at their requirement of 5,000 people per village) who fall into the project scope.

The investment

“Each Millennium Village requires a donor investment of $300,000 per year for five years. This includes a cost of $250,000 per village per year (5,000 villagers per village multiplied by $50 per villager) and an additional $50,000 per village per year to cover logistical and operational costs associated with implementation, community training, and monitoring and evaluation. Note that this level of external support is fully consistent with the 2005 G8 commitments for official development assistance to Africa by 2010. The other $60 per villager per year will come from village members, local and national governments and partner organizations, making for total funding of $110 per person per year.”

This is a fudge.  Firstly, sure, the global community may have promised a grand total of $50billion in support, but that usually has strings attached, and includes a wide range of other bilateral investment.  So the full amount isn’t available.  Secondly, most African governments don’t spend their own money on internal development.  Thirdly, the villages have no money (since that is the reason they were chosen).  One way or another, all of that $110 will have to be donated.

That means we are investing $550k annually for each village over a five-year period (i.e. $2.75 million).  To reach all villages in the scope requires an investment of around $172 billion.

The return on investment

So much for the background.  One of the things I’m often asked on African tourism development projects is, “Does this town/area have good tourism potential for development?”  My answer is always this:  “Are there men and women by the side of the road selling curios?  If not, then no.”

People in Africa are not poor because they are ignorant of their own needs, or of how to earn a living.  Neither are they really victims of circumstances beyond their control.  Given the right environment, Africans are as capable of supporting themselves as is anyone else. When the Zimbabwe currency was worth less than spit, inflation was several trillion % and nothing was available for sale. A few months after the Zimbabwe government abandoned the Zimbabwe dollar in exchange for the US dollar everything is available, investment is happening and production is shooting up. Zimbabwe may even be entirely self-sufficient for food again by the end of next year. And that is without any major international intervention.

So, as far as the MDP villages are concerned, my first question is this:  “Are other villages visiting the MDP villages, becoming inspired, and copying this model?”

The answer is: No.  No-one is copying the villages.  No private investor has turned up and offered to do something similar.  Scratch that, George Soros turned up and made a spot donation of $50 million in 2006 to fund 33 villages.  But that is hardly investment.

There are a whole host of reasons that I can spot:

1. The investment changes nothing about the legal and economic situation in the country at hand; governments are still corrupt, infrastructure is still non-existent.  Even if the MDV were to produce a major food surplus, who would they sell it to and how would they get it to market?
2. The project makes a great deal of the village-based ownership structure.  This is a collectivist / communist system.  If no-one owns it, then there is little incentive for individuals to work harder, since everyone will get the same outcome.  Like most projects of this nature, the output will continue as long as the expensively-paid consultants are around, then it will return to its base level.  The only reason the Kibbutz system has lasted 100 years is the donations of both the Israeli government and of outside donors.  As soon as the Israeli government cut funding, then the Kibbutzim started to close.  Now only those most hardy (or the very few who have major industries earning revenue) are still functioning.  But at least the Kibbutzim were self-created.  The MDPs rely for their energy on do-gooder outsiders.
3. Who owns the investment?  If something intangible like a “village” owns the products of individual labour and investment, then what does a person with ambition do?  Can he/she sell their stake in the village and use the money to go to university, or buy a house?  Who decides on what the profits (should there be any) be spent on?

Even in the best-case scenario, all that you achieve is that a group of famished and unhealthy people are less famished and less unhealthy.  For an investment of $2.75 million.  Is it really sufficient to take people from earning $1/day to say $2/day?

What else could you achieve with that money?

You could build a nice, labour-intensive factory for $2.75 million.  Imagine the impact of 62,000 new factories on the central African economy?  And imagine all the things that would be required for such a thing to happen … roads, rule of law, healthcare, education.  All of which would be affordable if millions of people were earning proper salaries.

This isn’t happening.  There are no investors in Africa beyond a few resources and the inevitable mobile telephony.  Africa is 2% of the world economy.  To put the MDP investment in perspective ($110 per person), foreign direct investment in Africa is worth only $19 per person per year.

Whitey Basson of Shoprite, a major African retailer, put it best last week:  “It takes 15 inches of paper to cross a border in Africa.”  Africa’s countries are regularly ranked as the most appalling and corrupt places in which to do business.

The MDP villages do not change that situation.  The agricultural techniques behind the project may be sound, but the economics are a failure.

And, if the economics are a failure, then what is the point of the project?

Star Wars doesn’t exactly fit in any film genre. It has action and romance, but it isn’t an action or  a romance film. It isn’t sci-fi either, though for lack of a better classification it often gets put in the genre. Star Wars is a myth. It reveals itself in the opening scroll, “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away….” From the beginning we’re separated from the mundane by a thin line of imagination, but the line is so thin that seeing the fantastic in our own existence is nearly impossible to miss. Campbell was fond of saying that, “Myth is a public dream and dreams are private myths.” Lucas managed to draw the line between them with precision and grace. And in doing so gave Campbell his life-long dream: a modern myth. That is, the psychological motifs present in all mythology dressed in metaphors accessible to modern man.

With the predictive powers of hindsight it’s easy to see Campbell becoming the scholar he was. His middle class childhood in New York state was dominated by an intense fascination with all things Native American. The auto-didactic streak that would characterize his life was evident in a young man reading through whole library collections for pleasure. His early biography is punctuated by profound moments that clearly shape the man he would become. On the return from a European vacation with his family, Campbell befriended Jiddu Krishnamutri. The trans-Atlantic length conversation they shared prompted Campbell to forsake his native Catholicism and ignited his curiosity for the beliefs beyond his personal context.

In 1927, he left for Europe again, this time as a post-graduate student at Columbia University. He was to study Old French, German and Provencal as part of his Medieval Literature studies. He found far more than he expected. He began a life-long love affair with the Cathedral at Chartres; discovered Joyce and Mann; wondered at post-impressionists like Picasso and Klee; and began making sense of the world under the influence of Freud and, especially, Jung. Upon his return to America, he proposed adding Sanskrit and modern art to his course of studies at Columbia. His advisers felt that neither was appropriate to the study of Medieval Literature, and so Campbell left formal, higher education for good.

But he did not leave education. With little hope for gainful employment – it was 1929 – Campbell commenced five years of self-education and travel. He broke each day into four, four-hour blocks, three of which were spent reading. To his impressive foreign language abilities he added Russian, because he wanted to read War and Peace and assumed that much would be necessarily lost in translation. He traveled the U.S. extensively during those years, befriending John Steinbeck and living next door to Ed Ricketts. He spent a year as the headmaster at The Canterbury School and published a short story. And he spent another year living in a rustic, tourist cabin in Woodstock, NY; he simply asked publishers for books, and since no one was purchasing them, they obliged.

A 1932 journal entry shows a man deep in thought and points the way to his ultimate destination:

I begin to think that I have a genius for working like an ox over totally irrelevant subjects. … I am filled with an excruciating sense of never having gotten anywhere–but when I sit down and try to discover where it is I want to get, I’m at a loss. … The thought of growing into a professor gives me the creeps. A lifetime to be spent trying to kid myself and my pupils into believing that the thing we are looking for is in books! I don’t know where it is–but I feel just now pretty sure that it isn’t in books. — It isn’t in travel. — It isn’t in California. — It isn’t in New York. … Where is it? And what is it, after all?

Creepy as it may have been, Campbell eventually took a position in the literature department of Sarah Lawrence College. He retired from the same position 38 years later, still without his doctorate. He spent the rest of his life examining, pondering, discussing and sharing the questions he asked himself in 1932.

Some claim that Campbell was not a great scholar of myth and religion, and to some extent this is true. He never claimed to be one. He was, however, a brilliant synthesizer, able to take in the big picture and tease out the similarities in prima facia dissimilar traditions. He saw context where others saw only details. He shared with Jung a vision concerning the common psycho-spiritual context of humankind. Like Jung, he he saw myth as a means for man to describe the context that was simultaneously internal and external, the present and the eternal. But foremost, Campbell was an educator. He had the gift of the story-teller, and it allowed him to share scholarly thoughts in a way that engaged the not-so-scholarly.

The long conversation with Bill Moyers (The Power of Myth) recorded shortly before his death is a staple of public library AV sections. He’s best known for efforts of that sort because they are so accessible. But his writing is hardly confined to popularizations of myth. The Hero with a Thousand Faces is a deep and complex work exploring the hero monomyth as it has been retold countless times around the world and throughout history. The four volumes of The Masks of God are a heavily footnoted history of man’s spiritual journey from the deepest mists of prehistory to expressions of mythology in modern art and culture. They could easily constitute a fine lay education in comparative myth and religion.

Campbell may be one of the handful of people who understood Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, co-authoring an explanatory tome. And he edited the collected works of Heinrich Zimmer and Carl Jung. And all of this was done in the context of a long marriage, a distinguished teaching career, and a host of deeply intellectual friendships that spanned the globe.

Myth, in Campbell’s view, is metaphor. It is a means of accessing truth and wisdom, and it forms a context in which to integrate the boon into life. He liked to point out that “happily ever after” in fairly tales did not mean “without care or worry”, but rather “knowing and integrating wisdom into daily life.” It troubled him that modern man has little connection to myth, and he rightfully wondered if our sorry state of affairs is the result of too little mythic understanding. For Campbell, this situation did not exclude the throngs of devoutly religious people the world over. He often pointed out that these people are regularly guilty of mistaking the metaphor for the truth that it describes.

His work is a testament to the thought and belief of all humanity, and to the idea that knowledge is understanding, rather than power. He was an erudite scholar, but the rogue’s glint in his eye was impossible to hide. And he spent a life time imparting knowledge that came with the roguish and mildly subversive instructions that we should follow our bliss.

Image credit: The Joseph Campbell Foundation (click for further bio, complete works, etc.)

The reading list given for Campbell’s “Introduction to Mythology” course at Sarah Lawrence.

OK, I didn’t hit him with a chair. It was The Dad, after all. Still. I was plenty steamed by his statement. But upon reflection, I realized it wasn’t an insult. I’m a teacher because I really can’t imagine doing anything else with my life. I enjoyed my time as a reporter, but I could see that newspapers were dying, and in defiance of one of The Dad’s favorite sayings, they were taking it with them. And so, after 15 fun and fulfilling months as a reporter and columnist at the Pictorial Gazette (1889-2008, RIP), I returned to the classroom. That is, I tried to return, but most classrooms in this state didn’t want me.

I applied to over 50 different school systems in Connecticut and went to 23 interviews. My problem? With over 20 years of experience, I was an expensive hire, and I didn’t look very good on paper. I went to Middle Tennessee State University, because it was the only school I could afford. I once heard a local principal say that when she had an opening at her school, the Ivy League graduates’ resumes went to the top of the stack. Sure, picking your staff based on the education their parents could afford to give them made perfect sense. I didn’t say that, because I desperately wanted to teach at her school, but I thought it really loud! Besides, I scored a 196 on my English II PRAXIS test, and the folks at ETS said that was a pretty good score, so good that they wanted to know how I cheated.

I didn’t cheat. I just have an uncanny memory for words and stories, and 25 years of classroom experience to work with, so for me the test wasn’t that hard. Finally, I was given a position as a long-term substitute seventh grade Language Arts teacher at a middle school in Waterbury. Now, as a new arrival to the Nutmeg State, I don’t know a lot about the geography and history of Connecticut, but when I told a few of my acquaintances that I was going to teach in Waterbury, their reactions ranged from utter shock to profound dismay.

“Waterbury? Did you say Waterbury?” asked Mike the sandwich guy from Subway.

“Yes,” I replied. “It is a long drive, almost 60 miles, but it’ll be great to be back in the classroom again.”

“Have you ever been in a Waterbury classroom?” he asked. “I’ve heard the kids there can be quite a challenge. I mean, what with your accent and all.”

“Hey, my southern accent is not a disability, no matter what those folks in Hartford think,” I retorted. “Y’all just gimme my ham, damn sandwich. Here‘s 7 dollars, cash money. You better be glad these here chairs is bolted to the floor.”

And so, on March 21, 2007, I stood before my young charges with the assistant principal beside me. I knew I was back where I belonged. True, my students were very urban, very hip, and very different from me, but they knew the rules, and kids are kids, right? I hadn’t been that happy for over two years.

I stayed happy for three minutes. Then the assistant principal left, and Chaos, husband of ancient Night, took over. Kids are still kids, but the rules have died, and I didn’t see the obituary. There have always been a few unspoken traditions that every classroom has. Simple things such as when the teacher asks a student to sit, he expects that student will sit. Or when a teacher asks the class to stop screaming, he expects that a few of them will. He doesn’t expect students he doesn’t teach to simply wander into his room without permission, nor does he expect his students to leave whenever they felt like it. But these expectations are all smoke and mirrors, and my Waterbury students had learned that if they wanted to ignore me and everything I suggested, there was nothing I could do about it. When I asked two girls to stop singing, it caused the entire class to break into some nightmarish Middle School Musical. When I asked another student to stop screaming, it became a contest between him and his peers to see who could scream loudest at the fat southern guy.

“Man, what’d you come here from Texas for?” asked one of them.

“I’m not from Texas,” I corrected him. “I’m from Tennessee.”

“Do you drive from Texas every day?” he asked. “That’s a long drive.”

“He don’t drive, he got a plane,” added another. “Hey, Fat Tex, can I fly your plane?”

“I don’t…I’m not…”

“Fat Tex got a plane, don’t play that game, don’t give me no lip, or you go down in flames…”

“Ummm…you need some work on your rhythm,” I suggested.

“You need to shut your fat Texas mouth,” was the reply.

And so it went on a good morning. On a bad morning, the profanity buzzed around my head like locusts. Now, I’ve led a man’s life. I was in the Navy, and my father, The Dad, had seven kids, so he knew all about cursing, but I’d never heard the F-bomb thrown about so casually or so often. And that was in the Teacher’s Lounge. The students were even worse. I was cursed in English, Spanish, Portuguese and Albanian. I discovered that Eastern European cursing sounds rather clunky when compared to the flowing ferocity of my Dominican and Puerto Rican students. But even if Albanian lacks the harmonious sounds of Spanish, when uttered correctly, there is no doubting its passion.

I made seven phone calls to parents the first week. Four of the numbers had been disconnected, I left two messages that were never returned, and had a short conversation with an elderly gentleman from Uzbekistan, I think. Clearly, I was on my own, and I had to see it through to the end of the school year. Twelve weeks. That was 84 days, or 420 class periods, or 18,900 minutes.

Every morning I sat with my fellow teachers, waiting for our planning period to end. I have heard that soldiers in the Great War, just before another futile charge against enemy machine guns, would take an intense interest in the most mundane things, such as a cloud or a patch of grass. It was much the same with us.

“Oh, look,” said one. “Here is a stain. A coffee stain, I think. Look at how it flowed then dried.”

“This table must be uneven,” said another. “It must lean to the north. I wonder if the ocean pulled it this way?”

Their voices were so low, I had to strain to hear them. Naturally, I had to add something to this subdued conversation.

“Brother John Bates,” I said. “Is that not the morning which breaks yonder?”

They stared at the stain, then at me, so I continued.

“’We see yonder the beginning of the day. But I think we shall never see the end of it.’ That‘s a little Shakespeare. Henry V. It just seems appropriate to me now.”

“We aren’t going to see the end of the day?” stuttered a guidance counselor. “Are they going to kill us?”

“He’s just being dramatic,” said another language arts teacher. “Like we need more drama. Are you that dramatic in Texas?”

“I’m going to bring my level and fix this table,” said our science teacher. “But if the ocean is pulling the coffee that way, I don’t know how I’ll fix that.”

And then the bell rang. We sat in stunned silence for several seconds, and admired the stain before we rose, stiff and resigned, and made our way to our classrooms. I could hear them coming, a great tsunami of profanity and disregard, and in the midst of the cacophony, I heard someone say something about the fat guy from Texas.

We had less than three weeks left before the school year ended. That was fourteen days, or 70 class periods, or 3150 precious minutes of our lives. I think we all wanted desperately to be somewhere, anywhere else. But as we stumbled toward the noise, I knew that we had no other option. My co-workers were just like me. We really can’t do anything else.

It’s one of those days of American history that lives in infamy: April 20, 1999, the day Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris went on a shooting rampage at Columbine High School in suburban Denver, killing twelve students and a teacher, and inuring twenty-four others, before turning their guns on themselves.

Say “Columbine” today, and nearly anyone can tell you what it means. But as journalist Dave Cullen says in his new book on the tragedy, the real story of Columbine is only now starting to become clear. Media sensationalism, police cover-ups, scapegoating, and mythmaking have all distorted the story. Cullen’s Columbine, then, represents an important historical and journalistic effort to shed light on what really happened.

Cullen starts the book by recounting the massacre from the perspective of those who lived through it. He writes a gripping narrative, showing the confusion of events without falling prey to it. He finishes the book in a similar vein, but this time he recounts events from the perspective of the shooters. The result is a retelling of a story—twice—that many readers might think they already remember from the headlines and news clips.

But the real meat of the book comes in between in all the myth-busting Cullen does. For instance, media reports painted the shooters as two misunderstood high schoolers who’d been bullied to the point that they finally snapped. Cullen demonstrates that the two hadn’t been bullied at all, and that the shooters weren’t, for instance, targeting jocks or popular kids.

Nor did the shooters “snap.” Cullen lays out evidence suggesting that Klebold and Harris had been planning the attack for nearly a year. They’d already engaged in an escalating series of vandalism missions and acts of criminal mischief. Friends heard rumors that the pair had been shooting guns and making pipe bombs. The pair leaked other clues, including an explicit short story, which no one pieced together until everyone had the lens of hindsight to look through.

Cullen delves into the personal journals the two shooters kept as well as a series of “basement tapes” they recorded. Harris, in his journal—which he called “The Book of God”—expressed festering contempt for other people and frequently spoke about extinction fantasies. Cullen provides chilling details about the true extent of the duo’s plans, which would’ve made the actual outcome of their massacre seem merciful.

Harris and Klebold, says Cullen, wanted to perform an act of “performance violence” that would be seen as “mind-numbing, mesmerizing theater,” so stunning that it would top Timothy McVeigh’s bombing in Oklahoma City. Harris and Klebold “didn’t have political agenda of terrorists but adopted their methods,” Cullen says.

While this all may seem straightforward, Cullen employs masterful storytelling techniques in his book that add powerful impact. For instance, he refers to the shooters throughout by their first names in order to personify them more vividly. He structures the book so that the story of their preparations leading to the attack is told in parallel with the stories of the community as it tries to recover and rebuild after the attack.

Cullen tells the story of Patrick Ireland, a student who crawled to safety from a second-story library window and overcame incredible odds to not only walk and talk again but to achieve his goal of being class valedictorian. He also tells the story of Cassie Bernall, who reportedly professed her faith in God to her killers just before they pulled the trigger—a story later proved false even after Cassie achieved international fame as a Christian martyr.

And there’s the story of Brooks Brown, a former friend of Harris’s. In the year prior to the shootings, Harris engaged in a campaign of harassment against Brown’s family because he thought Brown had turned on him. Despite numerous complaints against Harris, police did nothing until after the shooting—when they tried to implicate Brooks as part of the crime.

In fact, the Jefferson County Police Department comes off looking like a confederacy of fools and villains. Cullen details a decade-long cover-up by the department as it tried to hide the ways it mishandled the case.

Cullen at once captures the uplifting spirit of a community that pulls itself together after tragedy while also showing the sad, shattered pieces still left behind. The toll of the attacks aren’t just measured in lives lost but in marriages destroyed, in families broken, in public confidence broken and public anxiety heightened.

While some portions of the book are necessarily graphic, Cullen never gets gratuitous. He avoids sensationalism in an effort to show humanity. His book strives for insight and understanding—and that’s no small feat for a tragedy so hard to understand.

There is perhaps no topic in America where we talk out of two sides of our mouths more than Education. Education is in crisis at all levels, but at the college and university level it cries out and no one seems to be listening. Everyone says education is important but our standards continue to drop and we fall behind other countries. Faculty, the hearts and souls of universities, are being relegated to “operating costs” which are forever scrutinized for reduction. The adjunct system, around a long time, provides that cost control, and it has slowly been eroding opportunities for full-time professors and the salaries and benefits that accompany that status.

When adjunct faculty handle a full-time course load plus work other part-time jobs to make ends meet it compromises the quality of their instruction which affects students. No matter how many courses adjuncts teach, they are still considered part-timers. It’s drudgery and adjuncts carry about the same status as a Wal-Mart greeter or grocery bagger, and the pay is about the same.

Let’s break it down.

Salary. Adjuncts simply do not earn a livable wage. When I divide my net pay by hours per week, it comes out to something like $11-12 per hour. The only way I can afford to do this is with supplementary income from investments. Other adjuncts are not so fortunate. Additionally, this hardship is by no way limited to adjunct instructors.

Matthew Benjamin in Bloomberg News recently reported, “The number of Americans who want full-time jobs but are working part time has increased 83 percent in a year to 9 million, according to Labor Department data.” He went on to say, “They are part of a broader group that includes those who want a job but have stopped looking for work and those who want full-time positions but have to settle for part-time employment. A measure of underemployment that counts those people has almost doubled in the past two years, to 15.6 percent, providing a more complete gauge of the labor market’s deterioration.” In the case of the adjunct, it is often a full-time work week at part-time pay.

As of 2004, my local County School District (K-12) had a base starting salary for first-year teachers of approximately $36K with post-graduate degrees. A first-level regular faculty Instructor position at the college has a salary range of $41-52K. Although I am in the system, I have applied twice for such a position and was not even contacted.

Benefits. There are none. Of primary interest, of course, is health insurance. Not even something basic like doctor visits and prescriptions. However the college does offer a benefit which full-time employees (faculty and non-faculty) can purchase: pet insurance. Locally, at any rate, this would be a public relations disaster except no one seems to know or care. I contacted a local newspaper reporter who covers higher education in the area. The reporter was not interested in the story.

There is a 403b retirement plan, which is mandatory. I need every dollar and the deduction doesn’t help me. When I questioned Human Resources, I was told schools do this to avoid contributing to employees’ Social Security – in other words, to save the college money.

Working Conditions. On the plus side, adjuncts work mostly unsupervised, but while the Administration says we have its full backing, there has been a growing culture of viewing students as consumers and professors as “facilitators.” It’s kind of the McUniversity model. Would you like a plus with that B? The widespread deficiency in basic skills and cultural literacy is shocking. The Administration also talks a lot about “student retention.” In four English Comp. II classes, no one had ever heard of Thoreau’s Walden, let alone having read it. Once in a discussion of psychology and Macbeth, I mentioned Freud’s theory of the subconscious. Blank stares. I asked how many had taken Psych. 101. A few hands went up. I said you covered Freud, right? No, they had not.

Many adjuncts with no other sources of income struggle to get by. I have heard of some teaching as many as nine courses across three campuses. (Editor’s Note: This phenomenon is not uncommon. I know one adjunct who taught eight courses per term at one campus, while also serving as the program director and consulting on the side.)

We do not have private offices, but instead a large shared room with computers, workspace, other equipment, lockers (this last gives it all the charm of a bus station). A new building opened recently with classrooms and offices. Many of the regular faculty moved their offices to the new building, leaving many vacant in the old one. A good number of them were quickly filled by instructors/consultants running a “Small Business Development” program.

An office, even closet-sized with no windows, is a small perk, but in the world of academic untouchables, no request is too small. The point is that an office communicates a sense of professionalism to students and and lends a sense of ownership and belonging to the instructor.

The college has a formal commitment to “Sustainability,” which appears proudly on their Web site. Areas of sustainability include the environment, economic growth, and social [my emphasis] responsibility.

This is embarrassing, when one considers the passive abuse inflicted on adjuncts. In fact, it is the height of social irresponsibility. I have heard of faculty being chastised for drinking from plastic water bottles. I suppose the only thing we should throw away is people. To my mind, it’s not far removed from Orwell’s 1984, where any statement must be accepted as true because the State says it is. At the very least there is a latent hypocrisy at work here.

The Lone Star College Model. In an article entitled, “Adjunct Inspiration,” The Chronicle of Higher Education reported in its March 27 issue that “officials say they are trying to improve conditions for both faculty members and students by offering a limited number of “full-time adjunct” positions. These are adjuncts, typically hired for an academic year, who work a full-time teaching load — usually five classes per semester. They receive full benefits and their pay is 70 percent of what a comparably qualified full-time faculty member would earn. That’s because full-time pay is based 70 percent on teaching and 30 percent on service and professional development. Adjuncts do not have the latter two requirements.”

Not great, but a better deal than we have presently. It might provide a good model or basis for working toward reform. It should not be characterized as a compromise, but as a step in the right direction.

The Larger Implications.  Tenured faculty seem often behave as though they have no stake in this situation. They do. They are systematically being phased out. This should be their fight, too.

The two-thirds model (adjunct staffing percentage) can be viewed as analogous to the Feudal system, where the peasants and serfs constituted the majority and wealth and power were concentrated in the minority ruling class.

For the future, we would have to ask who would be inclined to become an educator in the current environment?

Conclusion. In an interview, Michael Moore responded to a question about whether every American was entitled to health care. His reply, applicable here, was, “We have to decide what kind of people we are.” He was referring to our national character. Do we extend a hand to the deprived, or simply say “every man for himself”? Politically, health care, education, and livable wages are “social” problems. As soon as the “S” word appears, many reactionaries equate this with “social engineering,” a stone’s throw from the dreaded iron fist of socialism.

Institutions of higher learning should not follow the Wal-Mart business model (e.g., 39-hr. a week employees, classifying them as part-timers, who then do not qualify for benefits).

We are slowly but inexorably abandoning our national commitment to academics, and thus losing our vision. In doing so we cannot sustain our democratic way of life. One of our founding fathers put it this way:

“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” – Thomas Jefferson, 1816

____________________

Joe Domino is currently an Adjunct Professor of English at Palm Beach Community College in Boca Raton, Florida. His classroom instruction and methodology emphasize critical thinking, cultural awareness, and a sense of history. Joe is also a published fiction author.

This year, after having amassed a collection of more than 20,000 books, officials at the pristine campus about 90 minutes west of Boston have decided the 144-year-old school no longer needs a traditional library. The academy’s administrators have decided to discard all their books and have given away half of what stocked their sprawling stacks – the classics, novels, poetry, biographies, tomes on every subject from the humanities to the sciences. The future, they believe, is digital.

“When I look at books, I see an outdated technology, like scrolls before books,’’ said James Tracy, headmaster of Cushing and chief promoter of the bookless campus. “This isn’t ‘Fahrenheit 451’ [the 1953 Ray Bradbury novel in which books are banned]. We’re not discouraging students from reading. We see this as a natural way to shape emerging trends and optimize technology.’’

Instead of a library, the academy is spending nearly $500,000 to create a “learning center,’’ though that is only one of the names in contention for the new space. In place of the stacks, they are spending $42,000 on three large flat-screen TVs that will project data from the Internet and $20,000 on special laptop-friendly study carrels. Where the reference desk was, they are building a $50,000 coffee shop that will include a $12,000 cappuccino machine.

To date, this story has generated 432 comments (probably more by the time this has been posted). And you can just imagine. Leaving aside the obvious questions like “The big oversized art books too?” and “The bound copies of Life magazine?”, the commentators really get at the point that’s been nagging me as well—um, why? That sort of thing. It’s a pretty lively commentary, with about 95% of the comments running along the “How dare they?” lines.

So I was pleased that the other blogger in the family had a more sensible take on this, meaning the one with the library science degree who actually knows a thing or two about this sort of issue. And she zeroes right in:

Um, yeah. So first and foremost this is obviously a desperate ploy for publicity. I wonder if they were really expecting quite the universal derision that seems to have been heaped upon them: even the techie blogs think that this is insane. I know there’s no such thing as bad publicity and all, but I find it hard to believe that any parents looking to spend $160k on their child’s high school education will be reading this press and thinking “Gee, I hadn’t heard of Cushing Academy. AND they don’t have books in their library? SCORE!” Versus other schools that offer, y’know, both books AND the internet.

Most people talking about this article are waxing eloquent about how cozy it is to curl up in an armchair and turn the pages, and that’s all well and good, but it totally misses the way that a school library is utilized. School libraries aren’t for pleasure reading. I’m sure that even at a 4th rate school like Cushing, there isn’t much time for leisure reading: between academics and sports and extracurriculars, I know that I and pretty much everyone I knew rarely read for fun while school was in session in both high school and college. School libraries are for research, even at the secondary school level. They are depositories of academic books, often from academic publishers and with a very limited print run, and hard or impossible to find in a bookstore. They contain a wide range of reference books, not only your basic set of Encyclopedia Brittanica, but also more obscure reference texts. Trained librarians are there to assist students in learning how to do research.
….

I’m not actually as horrified as most people are over this publicity stunt, because it’s just too stupid to be shocking. It’s not even shockingly stupid because, hey, at least they’re being honest. It’s a school full of jocks doing their 5th year of high school and brain dead new money kids who like the idea of a New England prep school. The teachers don’t have any interest in enforcing limits on students using the web to research, and the students are too dull and lazy to actually do research the right way. So they’re just being honest that the kids don’t care, the teachers don’t care, and most tellingly, the parents don’t care. Because what kind of parent would send their child to a school without any books, but with a $12,000 cappuccino machine? Exactly.

This strikes me as being sensible. Prep schools are in a bind these days, like universities. Like any other enterprise, they need to meet costs, and to market themselves, and this may turn out to be a really clever marketing strategy—or a hugely dumb one. This really doesn’t speak to the future of books very much, other than to observe that a second tier prep school has decided that it doesn’t need any in its library. Well, the market will decide whether this is a winning strategy or not, and it will interesting to see whether this headmaster still has a job in a couple of years. What he’ll be judged on, of course, is whether this ploy improves Cushing’s college admittance performance. For all I know, the Cushing administrators behind this decision may have a very good grasp of the marketing dynamics relevant to the Cushing applicant pool.

There are all sort of reasons why Kindles might be a good idea—they may be greener, and they can be an interesing pedagogical tool for classroom instruction (embed the homework in with the reading assignments, say, for a chemistry textbook, with various heuristics for correcting wrong answers, that sort of thing—the technology already exists for all this). Curling up with one in the dim corner of the wood-panelled library in front of a cozy fire on a winter’s afternoon somehow doesn’t have quite the same resonance. But I can’t honestly say that that was part of my secondary school experience anyway, as fond as I was of my library—I was too busy doing research for the next dumb term paper. If we’re going to create a culture with a love of books, it’s going to come from a love of reading, and a love of ideas. Libraries with real books are necessary here, but perhaps not sufficient.

The above stamp was issued in 2000 to celebrate the bicentennial of the Library of Congress, which hopefully won’t be chucking all their books any time soon.

The Signal-to-Noise Journey of American Media

The 20th Century represented a Golden Age of Institutional Journalism. The Yellow Journalism wars of the late 19th Century gave way to a more responsible mode of reporting built on ethical and professional codes that encouraged fairness and “objectivity.” (Granted, these concepts, like their bastard cousin “balance,” are not wholly unproblematic. Still, they represented a far better way of conducting journalism than we had seen before.) It’s probably not idealizing too much to assert that reporting in the Cronkite Era, for instance, was characterized by a commitment to rise above partisanship and manipulation. The journalist was expected to hold him/herself to a higher standard and to serve the public interest. These professionals – and I have met a few who are more than worthy of the title – believed they had a duty to search for the facts and to present them in a fashion that was as free of bias as possible.

In other words, their careers, like that of Claude Shannon, were devoted to maximizing the signal in the system – the system here being the “marketplace of ideas.”

By now the critical reader has probably noticed that I haven’t mentioned money. Said reader might suggest that I wax a little too starry-eyed, that journalism was always about ratings, circulation and profit. The really cynical response might say – as I myself have said – that even our greatest reporters were doing nothing more than selling product. True enough.

However, the issue here is about the assumptions involved regarding the path to profit. In Cronkite World, the reporter (and editor and publisher) assumed that success had something to do with what I’m here calling signal. You attracted a larger audience and sold more soap if you did a better job investigating, digging, presenting the public with facts. When you did a better job than your competitor at providing the audience with relevant, meaningful, accurate information that helped them understand and interact with their environment, then you and your employer would be more successful.

That is, your success in the marketplace was intimately tied to your professional ability. Success was a function of signal.

Somewhere along the way that changed, though. Here’s what I think happened.

First, in Uncle Walter’s day you had three channels (networks plus local affiliates), you had a couple local newspapers and a local radio station or two. If you grew up in a place like I did (Winston-Salem, NC), you likely had no more than six sources of information available to you on a given day. If there were a major story to be discovered at the national level, the competition to break it was going to include CBS, NBC, ABC, UPI, AP, Reuters maybe, and that’s about it. If the story was local it was down to a couple local papers and the three local affiliates.

That’s a comparatively small field of competitors, and given the number of things that happen in a given week there were usually enough scoops to go around. So to a significant degree, it was possible to make a living off of signal.

What about today? How many potential sources for news are available to you? Legacy networks; national papers; cable news channels (and cable “news” channels); ubiquitous access not only to your local paper and TV affiliates, but to all local affiliates and papers; online alt.news outlets; blogs – millions and millions of blogs; advocacy group sites; and a plethora of other channels, including e-mail (and lists), newsgroups and forums, mobile (like Twitter), and on and on we go. Even if we assume that there’s 10 times as much interesting news to be scooped than their used to be, the competition for those scoops has grown at an insane pace. If you’re in the news business, you probably find that the ratio of news to competitors is dozens of times worse than it was when Cronkite sat in Katie Couric’s chair. Yes, several outlets are still trying – a couple national papers, AP, Reuters, etc. But that’s about it. Everybody else (Scholars & Rogues included) is trying to attract the attention of the public, and very few of the models in use rely on what we might see as a traditional approach to news and reporting.

So. The pursuit of signal ain’t cheap or easy. The return rate on that investment is hardly guaranteed. And even if you are doing pretty well at old-style reporting, competition for eyeballs is simply ridiculous. A news agency, therefore, that insists on the old signal-based model is fighting an uphill battle.

Welcome to the Jungle

As with the problem faced by the academy, described by Katherine Hayles in part 1, media businesses had (have, and always will have) an institutional need to make a profit. Whether there’s actually enough signal to go around is momentarily beside the point, because it’s easy to see how the perception might evolve in a corporate boardroom that the traditional approach is a losing game. (And in a market-driven society, “perception is everything” is literally true.) In this brave new world of 500 channels and seemingly infinite numbers of Internet-delivered information (and disinformation) sites, it’s harder than ever to attract necessary revenues the old-fashioned way.

The conclusion: if there’s 10,000 guys stomping all around Signal Lake, hundreds of boats jockeying for position on every square inch of surface, a million more casting off the bridge, all fighting over two or three half-assed little fish, then maybe we ought to wander over to the River of Noise. Something is always biting there.

If my theory is right, then, our media institutions are behaving the way they are out of a certain logic. Not an admirable or productive logic, but something that makes sense if you’re looking for cause and effect. To wit: at the moment, there’s a prevailing perception (likely accurate) that there’s a greater return – a massively greater return – to be had on noise generation than there is signal hunting. Putting a hard-nosed investigative reporter on the trail of an important story for a few weeks or months, that’s an iffy investment. Employing enough reporters to reliably fill up the 24/7/4ever news cycle, that’s expensive. How much easier it is to simply trot Matt Lauer and Ann Curry out there to primp and blather over the latest “development” in the Michael Jackson “story.”

The results? Well, the networks are making money, aren’t they?

So, if I can try and pull all this together:

• Once upon a time both academia and the news media were structured in a way that aligned personal and institutional success with activities that we might call signal.
• The landscape changed in ways that made it hard for the institutions (and the individuals within them) to continue succeeding using the established strategies. Specifically, these environments evolved in ways that made signal a scarce commodity at the same time the systems were expanding.
• Both environments adapted by cultivating new structures and processes that were able to survive on noise.

How Can We Return American Media to the Promised Land of Signal?

Maybe we can’t. The media genie running amok in America is a big, powerful one, and you can rest assured it ain’t going back in the bottle without the mother of all throwdowns.

Still, the damage that the Noise Media is wreaking on our society is intolerable – worse in nearly every respect than what has happened in the world of LitCrit, and I think I made clear how bad that is in part 1 – and we’d be advised to contemplate how we can at least boost our signal-to-noise ratio in the right direction. To this end, there are two things that need to happen.

First, at the risk of sounding like a broken record (because this seems to be my answer to everything), we have to dramatically increase our emphasis on education. Specifically, we need to cultivate stronger critical thinking skills. The reason is simple. An enlightened mind has a much lower tolerance for foolishness. The reason that media have been able to profit off of inane programming is because our culture has so aggressively pursued the anti-intellectual. While I’m not attempting to let the pimps who program our media outlets off the hook here, it is not untrue to suggest that their actions are a logical response to what the marketplace has become.

Second, we revive the public interest standard and make it the centerpiece for every deliberation that happens regarding media in the US. The public interest, not the corporate interest. Fowler and Brenner said, in the early ’80s, that “the public interest is what the public is interested in.” It was self-evidently stupid when they said it then, and the only thing that has changed in the intervening years is that now we have even more evidence to prove it. But thanks to their efforts on behalf of Reagan’s anti-public communications policy, we now live in a nation where “journalism” and “pandering to the lowest common denominator” mean fundamentally the same thing.

Perhaps the system has evolved in precisely the way we should have expected. But it has evolved into something that does not serve our society or its future best interest. The sooner we understand why it has spun out of control, the sooner we can begin taking action to transform it once again, this time into something worthy of a culture that regards itself as the most advanced on Earth.

Eventually she worked around to asking me for $500. Which wouldn’t be unreasonable under most circumstances, I suppose. Even though times are tight out there I do have a good job and it would be easy enough to argue that my degree from CU certainly didn’t hurt me any in getting the job or in the performance of my duties there.

But there won’t be a check. I told the nice young woman that I’d explained the situation in the past when the school had come calling, hat in hand, and that I’d explain it again and she could pass it back up the line if there were mechanisms to do so.

Here’s the issue. I entered the university shortly after the goddamned state passed the Douglas Bruce-inspired “taxpayer bill of rights” legislation (may Bruce die soon and rot in Hell for all the damage his malevolent bullshit has wreaked on the citizens of Colorado) that made it impossible for the school to make even critically necessary operational cost bumps in tuition. So they had to resort to the widespread use of “fees.” Which was fine, in some cases. But there were also other fees, like the athletic program fee. Even if you never went to a game, played a sport, watched a game on TV, or knew that there was an athletic program on campus, you were compelled to cough up the fee, which I recall being at least a couple hundred dollars a year.

Even though I’m a sports fan, this griped me. More importantly, though, it illustrates the prevailing philosophy that the school had during those years. Put simply, it went something like “we’re going to take your money because we can.” And they did.

There are two cases that led directly to what I told the student who called me today. The first was an insurance fuck-up. There was a time, in 1999, if I recall, when I needed to cancel my university insurance. I had secured coverage elsewhere and no longer needed the student policy. In order to do so, I had to fill out and submit a form by a certain date, which I did. My mistake was not doing so by registered mail, because they went ahead and billed me for the coverage (which was maybe $400 or so). I went to see them, said no, I sent in the form. They said we don’t have any form. And away we went. Those familiar with the workings of state university bureaucracies will recognize the process.

I appealed and lost, surprising nobody. To my way of thinking I was able to prove my case pretty conclusively, but you just got the sense, as the proceedings got under way, that there was a certain predestination about the verdict. Short of producing Jesus as a witness, my money was gone.

I wrote a letter to the U – can’t remember who all I sent it to, but it was designed to make a point for those interested in my future donor status – and explained that there was nothing I could do about this case since they had me by the balls. But I was giving them a choice. They could have this few hundred dollars, but it would be the last cash they would ever see from me. No response.

The second case came a few years ago when I was on campus for a picnic (my wife is a CU employee and her department has a get-together every year). Somehow I guess I parked illegally – in an empty lot, on, I believe, a Sunday afternoon during summer. Literally, the only car in the lot, the only car as far as the eye could see. I sent another letter, mainly on principle. Again, no acknowledgment – just the implied “STFU and send us the money.”

(If these cases didn’t antagonize me enough, they then decided to make an anti-intellectual climate disruption denier president of the damned place. But that’s beside the point.)

Okey-dokey. They made a liar of me and got a few more dollars, after all. But since then I’ve been rabid in making sure that I’m parked legally and violating no rules when I’m on the campus.

This is the second or third time that some unfortunate student has had the misfortune of drawing my name during a fund drive. In all cases I’ve been polite and made clear that I wasn’t upset with them. Not at all. But there won’t be a penny for CU. Not now, not ever, not even if I hit the Powerball and I’m the only thing that can keep them from having to shut their doors.

Perhaps, you might argue, there’s no way for an institution to build working policies that account for students getting pissed off and threatening revenge. If you did, you might say, they’d never be able to regulate parking or collect on any justly owed debt. That may be, but you’d have fewer irate alums if your policies and enforcement procedures didn’t border on taunting. There may not be a perfect answer, but there are damned sure better answers.

In the end, the ever-polite young woman said she was sorry I’d had such a hard time with the school. I laughed and told her that it had actually worked out pretty well, because over the last decade CU’s arrogance had saved me quite a bit of money.

If by some slight chance this post finds its way into the hands of some administrator charged with revenue-gathering and enforcement policies at some university or another, do with it what you will. Ultimately the choice between extracting short-term cash flow from an impoverished student and fostering a profitable relationship with a well-educated professional is yours, isn’t it?

Snark aside, Bondelli does a nice job of addressing Hough, who “argues that the increase in lifetime wages for graduates no longer makes up for the financial burden of university education and the ensuing student loan burden.” He also takes on one of the GOP’s most successful and devastating canards, explaining that

In 2003 when I was lobbying against tuition increases in Arizona, a Republican state legislator argued that a college degree is a personal investment that the students are paying for their own future financial prosperity.

I second Kevin’s thoughts (and encourage you to click over and read the whole post). However, I also think the response needs to run even deeper. In truth, as stupid as that Repub legislator’s argument was (and in all likelihood, as stupid as the legislator was), it’s an argument that wins over a lot of people if you let its underlying assumption go unchallenged.

Bondelli touches on the point in quoting University of Rhode IslandVice President for Administration and Finance Robert Weygand, who explains that

Public colleges need to promote and publicize the work they do for the community and their contributions to economic development. Well-publicized proof that they make a difference to the state, and not just the earning potential of individual graduates, is meaningful to lawmakers, even in tough times.

The underlying issue that must be dragged out into the light and stomped is that somehow a nation’s education policy is all about individual investment. This is “ownership society”-style bullshit and it traces its “intellectual” roots back through the eight-year lie that was the Reagan administration and into the conservative academic framework laid in the 1960s by the likes of Daniel Bell. It culminated in rhetorical low-water marks like “government isn’t the solution to your problems – it is the problem,” and unfortunately the Newspeak linguistic cross-patch that this crowd inflicted on an easily-duped public is still working its corrosive magic today.

The answer we give when faced with this kind of cynical forked-tonguery must make clear that it’s not about Little Billy choosing whether or not to invest in his future. Instead, the question is about what’s best for the nation. In a society where only the top 5% of economic elites can afford a quality education – and we’re heading in that direction at a rapid pace – that means that 95% of the nation’s intelligence, 95% of its genius, 95% of its creativity and insight and inventiveness and problem solving capacity, 95% of its scientific potential – 95% of that nation’s possibility is at risk. It’s likely doomed to go unrealized.

Imagine that nation engaged in a highly competitive global marketplace with countries that make refining their intelligence, regardless of class or station of birth, a top priority. Imagine a nation that’s much like America in size and socioeconomic structure and overall potential. And imagine that while we’re keeping 95% of our brighest and best away from learning as best we can, they’re moving heaven and earth to get their brightest and best all the education possible.

Let’s go a step further and make this a math question. The US has a population of around 300 million. Statistically speaking, “genius” is a term that (as flawed as it may be) refers to the top 2% intellectually. So that means that America is home to roughly 6 million geniuses. Now, say we only provide quality educational opportunities to the richest 5%. That leaves us with 300,000 of our best minds honest to their sharpest potential.

Now consider that other hypothetical country, call it AltAmerica. Same numbers, only this time you educate all your geniuses. Our 300,000 is now up against their 6 million.

Which nation do you think innovates the best products? (I start with that example, because obviously nothing matters besides feeding the consumerist beast, right?) Who more quickly comes up with cures for diseases? Who creates solutions to pressing social challenges? Who is best able to provide for the common weal while preserving the environment?

Over time, which nation comes to dominate and which one fades?

A nation that adopts a “let Billy decide whether to invest in his future” policy will be, in short order, at the mercy of a nation that makes educating Billy a top priority.

If you don’t like my math, fine, adjust to your liking. But the dynamic remains (and I’m framing the discussion in a restrictive fashion, as well, because you don’t have to be a rated genius to be smart enough to change the world). And by the way, I do have a couple of specific nations in mind. Neither of them has a population of 300 million, either. Both have over a billion people, and they have more honor students than we have students.

That politician that Kevin references is either stupid or corrupt, or maybe both. But whether he’s acting out of class-based malice or simple butt-ignorance, the policy he espouses would, over time, reduce the US to the equivalent if a slobbering backwater surrounded by thrumming, intellect-powered New Atlantises. No doubt he’d like to keep the rabble in its place, educated only enough to provide unquestioning labor for the power elite’s enterprises, but the dangerous fact is that he hasn’t thought this thing all the way through.

Which also demonstrates, by the way, that not everybody in that 5% elite is exactly rocket surgeon material. So maybe my scenario above was actually a little … conservative, if you will.

Thanks to Kevin for taking this issue head-on. I hope he won’t mind me adding my two cents…

It’s been entertaining watching American public “discourse” since the election. (I use that word in its broadest, most ridiculous sense, since nothing that hinges so completely on self-absorption, rank ignorance and pathological dishonesty can be accurately characterized by such a noble word. But indulge me. I’ve been working on my irony lately.)

On the one hand you have conservatives fainting dead away that we’re now in the clutches of a “socialist” president. Never mind that these folks wouldn’t know a real socialist if he was gnawing their balls off. Never mind that most of these folks think “socialist” is the French word for Negro. Never mind that Obama demonstrably is to socialism what Joe the Plumber is to brie-sucking Northeastern intellectualism. As arch-conservative TV pundit Stephen Colbert says, “this is a fact-free zone.”

On the other you have the righteous outrage of the progressosphere, which feels six different kinds of betrayed by a president who promised them the moon and stars and has now left them to what looks like at least a four-year walk of shame. If I might borrow from an old fraternity joke, imagine the following scene from the Oval Office:

Barack: Hey everybody, what’s the difference between a progressive and a toilet?
Rahm: I give up, Mr. President.
Barack: The toilet doesn’t follow you around after you use it.
[Entire Cabinet]: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!

A few days ago Chris Bowers, one of the progressive blogosphere’s smarter and more influential voices, announced that he was becoming a conservative Democrat. His reasoning was compelling. Let me sample a bit for you (and encourage you to go read the rest as soon as you’re done here).

You can “endorse someone other than a Democrat for President, and then have the Democratic leadership do whatever it takes” to keep you in the Party. “You get ten times the media mentions that one gets being a progressive.” You get “more money, too. You can proclaim that you are a conservative Democrat, and still have small, progressive, grassroots donors be by far your top contributors.” You can “hold up, water down, and threaten whatever Democratic legislation you want” with no consequences at all. “You get frequent meetings with the President and proclamations that he is one of your own.” If you bitch about it you get “threats about never hearing from the White House again.” You’re “far more likely to receive a major cabinet appointment. Not even counting the Republicans, New Democrats outnumber Progressives in President Obama’s cabinet by 7-1.” And that’s not nearly all.

Okay, so maybe Bowers isn’t really abandoning his fellow progressives. Maybe he was just being a smart-ass to make a point. I can’t say I approve of such tactics, but hey, my old pal Jonathan Swift was known for the occasional snark, so who am I to judge?

The point is that progressives have a beef with the new fauxcialist administration, and regardless of what you think about their issues, their analysis or their personal hygiene, a review of the facts certainly justifies their pique. Think about it.

• Obama the Campaigning Man was pretty clear in his disdain for the Defense of Marriage Act. Obama the President has apparently decided that gay rights can wait. (Don’t Ask Don’t Tell? Don’t bother.)
• Candidate Obama was balls-to-the-wall about greening the economy, and I mean yesterday. President Obama, whose favorability rating is running better than 2-1 for, seemed unable or unwilling to expend some of that political capital on the just passed ACES bill, which many experts think will accomplish diddley (or worse). (Again, whatever the eventual reality about this bill turns out to be is irrelevant – the point is that Obama did not act in accordance with the more progressive stance he had taken earlier.)
• And what about health care? A recent New York Times/CBS News poll showed overwhelming support for “a government administered health insurance plan like Medicare that would compete with private health insurance plans.” How overwhelming, you ask? Overall 72% were in favor of the “public option,” and 57% said they’d be willing to pay higher taxes to get it. Hell, 50% of Republican respondents want it. So, you have very high approval ratings. And you certainly have a significantly greater mandate than George the Conqueror did after nipping John Kerry in 2004. You have significant majorities in both houses of Congress. You have overwhelming popular support for a public option. And you can’t get it done? Seriously?

I’m sitting here trying to figure out why corporate America, which would stand to benefit tremendously from having the burden of insuring the citizenry lifted from its shoulders, isn’t in open revolt. (That part of corporate America that doesn’t include the insurance industry, I mean.)

It has been observed that the Republicans seem to be more effective with a minority than the Dems are when they have the entire country by the balls. GOPpers derail the train by threatening a filibuster, but the Democrats can’t seem to head off a bad idea with a damned-near buster-proof majority. How the hell is this possible?

This, of course, is what’s known as a “rhetorical question.” The butt-obvious answer is that the contemporary Democratic Party is not really a party, at least not in the same way that the GOP is. Instead, it’s a bizarre amalgam of progressives, “moderates,” bipartisan fetishists, “New Democrats,” DINOs and opportunistic Republicans (see Specter, Arlen). The median at present lies significantly to the right of Richard Nixon, who despite the recent revelation that he was in favor of abortion in the case of half-breed fetuses, posted a record that would make him pretty darned progressive by 2009 standards. (Good thing you dodged that bullet, huh Mr. President?)

Ultimately, Bowers and other frustrated progressives are right. The Democratic party just isn’t that into them. They’re useful when votes are needed, but are utterly incapable of leveraging that into actual influence. As far as the “responsible” centrists are concerned, progressives are the late-date with no self-esteem, the unwitting fat chick at the pig party.

So, what to do?

Playing along isn’t working. So how about rounding up all the members of the Progressive Caucus (and their many allies around the country) and opting out? Leave the Democractic Party. Form a third party of their own (or just join the Greens). All of a sudden the Democratic Party has a numbers problem. All of a sudden they lose majority status, chairmanships, agenda-setting stroke, etc.

I’m no expert on the rules of the American legislature, so I’m sure there are nuances I’m missing. Nonetheless, I imagine the Republican wing of the Democratic Party would wet itself. And in the short term this could be very good for the GOP, which would find itself in the plurality.

Longer-term, though, it seems like the progressives can make an argument – and one that is supported by some actual evidence – that they represent the will of a goodly slice of the American public. Even better, given how the youth vote seems to be trending, they can also argue that their hand is going to strengthen over time. Are these premises accurate? Hard to say. But they are testable hypotheses, and the posit is certainly plausible enough to be worth examining.

Maybe the remaining Dems respond by making the reality of the situation official and decamping for the GOP. Maybe the Blue Dogs and the “moderate” wing of the GOP abandon those pesky snake-handlers on the right and form a new “centrist” coalition. Who knows. If that did happen, however, America would at least have the refreshing luxury of an opposition party that, you know, opposed. We could get all that corporatist DC clutter, which thrives because it dominates both parties, up for a real referendum. What a campaign hook – America vs. the Beltway.

Part of me says “what if it backfires?” But the other part of me looks at the state of the current union, at the looting of the last eight (or, depending on your taste for the long view, 29) years, at the energy way too many Americans have to devote to worrying about what happens if they get sick or injured, at the staggering cost associated with continuing to fuck around with the environment, at the fact that millions and millions and millions of citizens have no hope at all of financial solvency, at the knee-buckling stupidity of a populace that’s been victimized by a brilliantly conceived War on Education, at…. Fuck it. You get the picture.

Off your knees, progressives. The worst that happens is more of the same. At the least do us the favor of dying on your feet.

You will want to know what happened. You may not immediately want to know what someone else thinks or feels about what happened. That may come later. You first want someone to tell you clearly and with minimal subjectivity what happened with no opinion or impression attached.

You live in a second-hand world. You need someone to observe the world first-hand when you cannot. Who will you trust to faithfully do that for you?

Sociologist C. Wright Mills described this half a century ago in the book The Politics of Truth:

The first rule for understanding the human condition is that men live in second-hand worlds. They are aware of much more than they have personally experienced, and their own experience is always indirect.

The quality of their lives is determined by meanings they have received from others. Everyone lives in a world of such meanings. No man stands alone directly confronting a world of solid facts. …

[I]n their everyday life they do not experience a world of solid fact; their experience itself is selected by stereotyped meanings and shaped by readymade interpretations. Their images of the world, and of themselves, are given to them by crowds of witnesses they have never met and never shall meet.

Yet for every man these images — provided by strangers and dead men — are the very basis of his life as a human being.

Your information needs may be summed up by three questions: How does the world work? Why does it work that way? What will be the impact on me?

The answers reflect the raw data of empirical observation and a neutral explanation of phenomena eventually followed by analyses laced with points of view. Those “crowds of witnesses” offer that information in many forms — books, movies, art, advertising, television, music, and the various means by which journalism and pseudo-journalism are distributed.

You first need to know what happened. But doesn’t it increasingly seem that your principal sources are also those who didn’t witness the event first-hand either? Doesn’t it seem as if your first notice of what happened comes from a second-hand source who is not a witness at all? Is that source someone using the pretense of a witness, someone who imbues that initial report with analysis laced with a point of view, pre-coloring and presaging your first impression? Which do you need first — a subjective point of view or one as objective as possible?

Reflect on your information needs. (Not your wants — that’s a different post.) What do you need to know? Why do you need to know it? Who will credibly tell you?

Mills’ analysis of understanding the human condition anticipates the digital world you live in. Your second-hand world consists of, in Mills’ words, “stereotyped meanings and shaped by readymade interpretations.” From what source do you not receive pre-digested reports?

If you want information without a point of view shaping it, perhaps you need Anne. She is a Fair Witness in Robert A. Heinlein’s “Stranger in a Strange Land.” Her employer, Jubal Harshaw, is asked to demonstrate her capabilities. Harshaw points to a building and asks Anne its color. Her reply: “White on this side.” In Heinlein’s fictional world, a Fair Witness has total recall, is fully impartial, and makes no intuitive or analytical leaps beyond what she can witness (such as assuming the color on the side of the building she cannot see).

A Fair Witness is the antithesis of a Spin Doctor. Anne, the Fair Witness, is a source of unfiltered fact. You are left to divine the meaning of that fact in a context uniquely yours.

In the midst of this high-noise, low-signal digital information age one S&R writer called “Shoutworld,” no Fair Witness appears to exist. Traditionally “objective” sources of information increasingly have colorized what happened through an ideological, self-centered, or selfish lens. The numbers of those sources who minimize the predigestion of what happened declines daily.

You eventually may find that subjective witness reports are necessary to help you ascertain context, importance, and meaning. On what basis, however, do you trust their authors?

If all your information sources tell you what it means before telling you what happened, how certain are you of what, indeed, did happen?

College is 120 credits: That’s eight semesters at 15 credits per semester, and don’t let the door hit you on the way out. And it’s pricey: For the academic year just ended, public four-year colleges charged for tuition and fees, on average, $6,585 (up 6.4 percent from last year), and private four-year colleges cost $25,143 (up 5.9 percent from last year) for the same. Now add up to $10,000 for room and board. In a recession, that’s tough for many students and their families to afford.

Hence the recent surge in colleges touting three-year degrees. Save money, they promise. Get a head start on life, they say.

Don’t bet on it. Three-year degrees short-change both the student and society.

Colleges do not need to formally offer three-year degrees. An astute prospective student who studies the curriculum requirements of the universities she is considering can figure out how to finish in three years. A good academic adviser can help.

In my 13 years of advising journalism students, I’ve had only two finish their undergraduate degree in three years — and both stayed to complete their master’s degrees in a fourth year. I’ve had a few dozen finish in seven semesters instead of eight.

These students took advantage of Advanced Placement courses in high school for which they were awarded college credit. Generally, a student who shows up at my university as a journalism major with 15 to 18 credits from AP exams (and those have to be major-appropriate credits) may easily finish in seven semesters, saving nearly $20,000. Add in a few 18-credit semesters and summer school, and she’s out in six, saving nearly $40,000. (Another issue: Is AP exam credit truly the equivalent of a college course?)

So I drew up a three-year journalism degree program. Even assuming no incoming AP or college credit, a student could finish it in three years and two summers. Oh — she’ll have to fit in those 400 internship hours, too.

A three-year degree is a bad idea for all but the most focused and mature of incoming freshmen. However, as the cost of higher education climbs at two to three times the rate of inflation, more colleges are pitching it to potential students. But if those colleges assert that the three-year degree is of the same quality as the four-year degree, they’re misleading their market.

Cramming 120 credits into three years reduces the time necessary for that leavening of the young. A steady diet of 18 credits plus summer school reduces the time available for reflection and meditation on what’s been learned. And three-year students miss out on a helluva lotta fun. My dean tells freshmen at orientation: “If you don’t have fun in college, you’ve failed college. It’s all about wisely balancing academics and fun.”

Proponents of three-year degrees argue that students get a “head start.” On what? Life? That’s specious, given increased life expectancy. The work force?

How does a potential employer — or graduate school admissions board — distinguish between a three-year degree holder and a four-year graduate? GPAs may be the same. Holders of degrees with 120 credits will have a major and probably a minor.

But if the freshman arriving with AP and college credits stays a fourth year, perhaps she’ll walk across the stage with two majors and two minors or a dual degree (bachelor’s and master’s) or one major and three minors.

She will likely have earned 135 to 142 credits. She will be more marketable than others on the stage with her because she will be far more accomplished. She will be easily distinguished from her peers.

It’s frustrating to see colleges turning to three-year degrees as a marketing tool to maintain or increase enrollments by dangling a money-saving carrot in front of hard-pressed families. It’s not necessarily colleges’ fault; after all, other factors driving tuition and fee increases are outside their control.

The American value system so far has not viewed reducing college costs as a principal route to economic stability (or national security). At all levels of education — primary, secondary, post-secondary — a national consensus has failed to emerge that places bailing out a flawed educational system on par with bailing out General Motors.

Been a long hard week. All around the college where I work as a benefits coordinator, programs are out of funding for the summer. Financial aid is strained to the breaking point by the influx of new students. Students come flooding in for vocational training designed to switch them out of their now-defunct line of work.

Worker retraining can pay for tuition, but not books. What program offers to pay for childcare? Can I qualify for financial aid if I worked most of last year? I have to stay in school to keep my food stamps; who has grant money? I field a dozen phone calls a day from students trying to find a way out of the current economic situation.

Trying to find a program to help each student is taxing at best and on bad days it is heartbreaking. Our state is broke and our social service safety net gets more threadbare each month. Keeping the hope alive for a struggling student can involve much more than books and tuition. Some students are homeless and need referrals for safe housing. In more flush times we sometimes help pay for their immunizations, utility bills, even transportation, but none of that help is coming this summer.

I read the text of President Obama’s speech in Cairo this morning. Towards the end of the 6,000 words he spoke about the power of educating women. Most of the students I assist are women. I had an interview today with a woman from Iraq attending our college to learn English. She came with her two small children, a social worker and an interpreter. She and her husband came to America to start a new life, but he hasn’t been able to find work so he is going back to Iraq. The children were born in America, so for now she plans to stay. As I sit and write about her now I realize that keeping hope alive also takes lots and lots of people willing to go the distance to help.

It’s easy to be cynical about the language of hope and the call to service issued by our President. When the rubber hits the road it’s going to be the people that embrace hope that will lift our collective boat. It happens with small acts. It happens when enough people show up every day to learn something new. It happens when we share scarce resources. It happens when we believe it can make a difference to embrace hope.

Wu Tao stands at the front of the bus, microphone in hand, radiating charm.

Wu “Harry” Tao (right) talks with St. Bonaventure
professors Carl Case (left) and Darwin King at the
Winter Palace in Xi’an.

As our group rides around Xi’an, Wu Tao serves as our tourguide. He stands in the bus’s center aisle and regales us with stories about the city’s past. He wears a dark t-shirt with a big numeral “8” on it—which has made him easy to find in a crowd—jeans, a pair of open-toed sandals, and a million-yuan smile.

When he points something out to us and tells us its name, he carefully repeats it and even spells it out for us to ensure we can follow him.

Tao is his given name while Wu is his family name, but Chinese custom puts the family name first, then the given name: Wu Toa.

Like many Chinese, Wu Tao has an American name, too: Harry. “Like Harry Potter,” he says with good-natured amusement. A lot of things appear to amuse him. He smiles freely and chuckles often.

The students are wild about him.

“I just want to go up there and pinch his cheeks,” one of them says.

Harry didn’t get his American name from the fictional British character, though; he got it from his school teacher, a ex-patriot from Toronto who’d come to China to teach English.

“He gave everyone in the class English names to help tell us apart,” Harry explains. In China, there are too many people with the same name—like Wu, for instance—so the teacher doled out America names in order to be able to distinguish his students when he called on them in class. It’s a typical practice throughout.

In college, Harry majored in English and tourism, which landed him in his current job at a state-run tourism agency. It’s a gig he’s been doing for fifteen years. He handles some sixty groups a year.

Between stories about Xi’an, Harry tells us a lot about himself and gives us insights into the lives of ordinary people in China.

Harry lives in a three-bedroom apartment with his wife and four-and-a-half-year-old son, Yoyo. “Like the violinist,” Harry says. Yoyo has an American name, too: Harrison. “Because he is Harry’s son,” Harry explains with another of his chuckles, and his whole face breaks out into another huge smile.

Chinese couples can have one child, although if the parents are, themselves, each single children they can petition the government for a birth certificate to have a second child. They children must be spaced at least four years apart. Having a child illegally means the child won’t have access to the health care or education systems. In the countryside, the government enforced the rule less stringently.

Harry’s parents also live with them. “It is hard to have privacy,” he admits, “but they do so much to help us. So much. That is the nuclear family in China: four grandparents, two parents, one child.”

Harry’s parents take their grandson to kindergarten in the morning, then typically go to the park for exercise. His father will do tai chi while his mother will line dance—an activity involving parasols, far removed from the American version.

Harry’s father will usually bring his pet bird with him in its small cage, and he and other retirees will have birdsong contests.

Harrison will spend the day in kindergarten from 7:45 a.m. until 6:30 p.m., when Harry’s parents will again pick him up. The schedule, including three meals, two snacks, and a nap, is designed specifically with working parents in mind.

As with most American families, Harry and his wife both work. In Xi’an, the eight-hour workday runs from eight a.m. until noon; after a two-hour siesta, workers go back from two p.m. until six.

For school kids beyond kindergarten, the day is similar. They’ll take four classes between eight a.m. and noon, get a two-hour break, and then take two classes between two o’clock and three-fifty. They might have sports or exercises after school.

Middle-school students at dismissal time on a
Sunday afternoon

Students aiming for the country’s prestigious colleges will enroll in middle and high school programs that frequently require work on the weekends. Each year, some 7.1 million kids will take college entrance exams—all on the same day across China—and about fifty-five percent pass.

College tuition in Xi’an runs about 2,800 yuans—about $415—plus room and board. Tuition in a big city like Beijing or Shanghai might run anywhere from between five thousand to twenty thousand yuans.

Ping pong is the country’s most popular sport, although soccer is gaining popularity. Basketball is huge, too, in part because of the success of NBA star Yao Ming, the seven-foot, six-inch center for the Houston Rockets, who hails from Shanghai. Basketball is also so popular because most schools have the space to accommodate a basketball court, while the space for a soccer field is tougher to come by.

Politics gets much less attention from people. “Ordinary people don’t care about politics,” Harry says. “Ordinary people care about our food, our clothes, our house, our future.”

Citizens gain the right to vote at sixteen, and they have nine parties to choose from, although the Communist Party is the only one that matters. “Look at [our political system] as one big red flower with eight tiny green leaves on it for decoration,” Harry says.

“Do people vote?” a student asks him.

Harry pauses. Pauses. Pauses.

“We have the right to vote,” he finally says, chuckling, his face breaking out into another of his smiles. “Most people don’t care.”

For all its influence, only one in twenty-four people belong to the Communist Party, giving it a membership of about 68 million.

Party members are not allowed to have any religious affiliation. In China, though, that hardly seems to be a problem. In the shaanxi province, where Xi’an is located,only about 750,000 people belong to a religion, Harry says. The province has about 250,000 Christians, about 150,000 Muslims, and another 350,000 fall into a variety of other sects like Buddhism and Taoism, although Buddhism is the largest organized religion in the rest of the country. “Most have no belief,” Harry says, adding that he and his wife are among them.

He chats freely with the students, answering their questions with politeness and honesty. When someone asks him about free health care for everyone, for instance, Harry shakes his head: “In China, there are too many people. Impossible.”

At one point, he mentions the fact that many young people from the countryside aspire to go into the army after they graduate from school because service guarantees a government job, which is better than farm life. “The People’s Liberation Army has three million soldiers,” he says.

“Three million soldiers to protect one-point-three billion people?” a student asks. “That doesn’t seem like enough.”

“We also have nuclear weapons,” Harry reminds her.

Harry and me outside the Xi’an airport

Harry remains with us during our entire trip, all the way through the check-in process at the airport as we head off to Beijing. Students stop to get their photo taken with him. I grab one too. He graciously allows us to snap away with our cameras.

“He was so good,” one student says. “He was awesome,” says another. The flock around him like he was one of the Beatles.

“Your trip is so smooth, my job is so easy,” Harry tells us with another of his smiles. “I hope you enjoy rest of your time in my country!”

The last two weeks of April are a trying time for me. It’s when I typically introduce my middle school students to poetry, real poetry. For many of them, it’s the first time they’ve waded past Shel Silverstein and into the murky metaphoric waters beyond. It’s also when I am inevitably tricked into reading large tracts of adolescent poetry written about old boyfriends or girlfriends or others “who have done me wrong.”

My poetry unit always follows a predictable pattern. I start with a work that is sure to get their attention, and this year that was “Traveling Through the Dark” by William Stafford. In that poem, the narrator has come upon a deer that has been hit by a car on a narrow road, and his civic responsibility is to push the carcass into the ravine, so other motorists won’t be endangered. Simple enough, until he realizes the dead deer has an fawn inside that is still alive. After a brief but intense internal struggle, the narrator pushes the deer off the road and into the abyss.

“Are you gonna test us on this?” asked Jake. “Cause I think I could pass a test on this poem.”

“But wait,” asked Heather. “Why did he push it off the road? What about the baby deer?”

“What about the baby deer?” I asked back.

“The baby deer was still alive,” she yelled. “He pushed it off a cliff before it could be born. Why?”

“What else could he have done?” I asked.

“Stop answering my questions with questions!” she demanded. “That baby deer isn’t ever going to be born and you don’t care, you just don’t care! This is why I hate poetry! It’s all about death and dying and poor little baby deers.”

“Shut up, Heather, he said he wasn’t going to test us on this,” said Jake.

“Baby deer,” I corrected her. “It’s spelled the same in its singular and plural form. And I didn’t say anything of the kind, Jake. But back to the work. He didn’t like doing what he did, but he had no choice. And neither will you.”

“I’m never going to run down and kill baby deer in my car,” she exclaimed.

“Neither did he,” I replied. “He came upon the deer after somebody else had hit it. But then he had a duty to his fellow citizens to remove the dead creature.”

“He could have cut the baby deer out,” she said. Heather had begin to tremble, and I was worried about her. “I would cut the baby deer out and take it home and raise it like a pet.”

“I don’t think I’d want a dead, bloody baby deer in my car,” said Jake.

“It wouldn’t be dead you idiot moron,” shouted Heather.

“Heather, use another word,” I corrected. “You’re not an idiot, Jake.”

“Thanks, Mr. H.”

The poem had done its work. I managed to explain to Heather and her classmates that part of driving cars was the unfortunate and one-sided encounters we will have with small furry critters that scamper in front of us as we drive. When that happens, sometimes the best thing we can do is feel badly that it happened. But I wasn’t ready to stop driving just so I could avoid ever hitting animals in my car.

“The power of this poem,” I said at the end of class, “is that it takes us all to an unpleasant place where we all will have to go. It makes us think about something that isn’t pleasant, but that is probably unavoidable. Poetry isn’t all about love and hearts and old boyfriends. It’s about the million little things that we all deal with everyday.”

“Speaking of old boyfriends, would you like to read some of my poetry?” asked Heather. “I brought volumes 1 through 27 to school today. I‘d feel a lot better if you could give me a real critique.”

That night, my eyes began to bleed around volume 9. I went to the kitchen to get some water and surprised a mouse who had discovered the joys of whole grain cereal. He scurried his way into a little used cabinet, and when I opened the door, I was shocked at the amount of mouse waste I found.

“Honey,” I screamed. “We have mice.”

“Are you sure?” said Nancy. “I’ve never seen any mice in this house.”

“One just went into the cabinet here,” I said. “And look. That is one nasty mouse bathroom, that is. Worse than a West Virginia rest stop.”

“You’ll have to buy some traps,” she said.

“I can’t do that. I had a bad experience with a mouse trap once.”

“What was that?”

“It worked,” I said. “I’ll never get over the sight.”

“Well, you can’t put out poison,” she said. “Not with Joey and his friends in the house. What about that special mouse tape? I saw some downstairs that the previous tenant left. That doesn’t look too painful.”

“Mouse tape! Yes! I like the sound of that. No chemicals, no mouse parts to clean up. I wonder if it works?”

The next morning, I stumbled downstairs for some caffeine, and decided to check the mouse tape. I opened the cabinet door, looked inside, closed the door and stood for a few moments. Then I put my glasses on, opened the door again and looked. Nancy entered.

“Did the tape work?” she asked.

“Oh, yeah.”

“Did we catch a mouse?”

“A mouse?” I asked. “No, not a mouse. We caught six mice.”

“You’re kidding,” she said. “Can I see?”

“You probably shouldn’t,” I said. “One of them is looking up with a particularly sad and confused face. I think maybe the other mice coached him to throw the most effective expression at the first human who opened the door. It’s a good one. I kind of like him.”

“Let me see,” said Nancy. “Oh, he’s so sweet! Poor little thing. How could you put something as horrible as mouse tape in this cabinet! Aren‘t you ashamed?”

I know now that there are worse things in life than getting rid of dead mice. Much, much worse. Later, as I drove to school, I wondered if I should tell my students the tale of the sad mouse and his companions and the tape that left them mercilessly alive. Probably not. If I was a poet, I could write about it. But I’m not a poet. I’ll have to use volumes 10 through 27 of Heather’s poetry to burn the memory away, and I pray Jake’s prayer that I never get tested on my actions on that terrible, April morning.

Take the carbon out of sugar and you’re pretty much left with water. Methinks Someone failed their chemistry class. Or their marketing class. Or both.

I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling a bit parched – time to have a tall glass of certified carbon free sugar.

But this week, it gave its product to me for free. I would have gladly paid up to 5 cents to read just one of its stories. But the JS didn’t charge me. What kind of business model allows me to consume a product for free?

I learned of the story through an e-mailed version of Romenesko, the legendary (or infamous, depending on your POV), media news page at Poynter. org, the Web site of the Poynter Institute, a journalism think tank.

The Poynter e-mail contained this tease: “Wisconsin university football coach bans student reporters (http://www.jsonline.com/business/43539347.html).” I clicked on the link and —ta da — there it was, a story written by JS reporter Don Walker. Free. Didn’t have to pay a penny. And I would have. Gladly.

I know this isn’t a rare phenomenon. I suspect you’ve read news for free online, too. Bet you kinda expect it to be free, even demand that it be free. Perhaps you think it’s some kind of birthright. But in the long run, if you do not pay for the product of professional journalists, you will lose one of your best defenses against secrecy, corruption, and tyranny.

Those who wish to keep information from you, those who demand or offer kickbacks and bribes to get what they want, those who wish to secretly manipulate the levers of power unfairly for selfish financial advantage, those who wish to attain and maintain power over you … they’re winning. They’re winning because fewer and fewer journalists are keeping an eye on them, holding them accountable for their words and actions. Remember, that’s the deal the Founders gave the press: Hold government accountable, and we’ll protect you from government intervention.

If you don’t pay for the product produced by professional journalists who cover the “eat-your-spinach” stories bloggers don’t, won’t, or can’t, then don’t complain if the powerful and influential take advantage of the lack of scrutiny formerly provided by the 5,900 journalists who lost their jobs last year.

In 1990 America’s daily newspapers had 56,900 staffers, very close to the historical high, according to the American Society of Newspaper Editors. Newspapers were cash cows for investors, with profits north of 20 percent. In 2000, the population of journalists at dailies was still high — 56,400. Then the Internet came, folks say, and stole all the advertising revenue. Profit margins have been halved — as revenue has dropped precipitously. (Of course, it’s not as simple as that. Apparently, bad management and arrogance had much to do with the decline of circulation, and hence the declining advertising revenue, of daily newspapers. In effect, corporate newspaper management shot itself in the foot as it bad-mouthed the Internet as an irrelevant upstart.)

To attempt to maintain the profitability of that now-highly suspect business model, newspaper managements whacked jobs — the very jobs that produce the product those executives presumably want to sell. This has to be among the dumbest responses to economic stress in corporate history.

At the end of 2008, only 46,700 journalists were left at the America’s daily newspapers. 2009 is off to a rough beginning: The Web site Paper Cuts reports that about 8,500 newspaper staffers (including journalists) have been laid off or bought out as of mid-April. (Paper Cuts is a Web site by Erica Smith, who has been tracking newspaper layoffs since 2007.) It is possible that by 2010, the number of daily print journalists will have been halved in only a decade.

Surely that’s not a positive development for the democratic health of the Republic.

Interestingly, the nation’s premier journalism graduate programs are seeing marked increases in applications: Columbia, up 38 percent; Stanford, 20 percent; and NYU, 6 percent. But these new students are not necessarily seeking to become journalists. Says Jim O’Brien, director of Northwestern University’s Medill Career Services office:

Corporate communications is a growth area in terms of opportunities for jobs for our MSJ grads. Both corporations and nonprofits who are interested in communications, where they had typically looked at an English major before, are now thinking that a journalism grad might have leg up on those candidates because of their training.

This is a two-pronged blow to “eat-your-spinach” news. First, newspapers are shedding the very people trained —and paid — to do that. Second, former journalists and others are seeking graduate journalism degrees to become corporate communicators.

That means fewer professionally trained and experienced journalists are digging for information corporations and governments wish to hide, and more smart people are being trained — and, eventually, paid handsomely — to do the hiding.

They’re winning. Democracy is losing. Please consider that next time you read a news story online — for free. It may be, in the long run, a very costly read.