It’s interesting that people who detest Reagan and Thatcher feel nothing nearing that degree of opprobrium towards Clinton and Blair who not only continued Reagan’s and Thatcher’s deregulation but magnified it to an extraordinary degree.

Weirdly, Carter who started it and Clinton who took it to extraordinary heights are never really blamed for neoliberalization like Reagan who was not the first nor the last to do it. Reagan was the most open and honest about it while Carter and Clinton hid behind slick speeches about how much they cared. To me, that would be a reason to despise the Cs and respect the R but, apparently, people prefer to be lied to.

One thing that I always wondered about in regards to our neoliberal administrators is why they are so mean. How hard would it be to say, “Look, I know this sucks. It’s very hard, I completely understand but it has to be done”? You’d think it’s the easiest thing to say, and then people don’t hate you.

On Tuesday we had an administrator speak to us, a group of almost 40 people. I know him well from before he went into admin. This is a guy who has no difficulty with turning up the charm, being sweet. Students always adored him because he could be very personable. It must have been hard to stand in front of a group where everybody hates you. But instead of trying to show (or fake, whatever) kindness and understanding, he kept attacking people in very nasty ways. It was completely unnecessary because the decisions he was defending in this way aren’t his own.

But I finally figured it out. They are so nasty because they are terrified. Not of the higher-ups but of the neoliberal worldview they have espoused. They are lashing out not for any utilitarian reasons but because they can’t deal with the fear and loneliness of living within the mentality where everything is always your own fault. Seeing yourself as an entrepreneur of your self is scary. They are terrified of finding out that bad things can happen to people who didn’t mismanage themselves, who didn’t do anything wrong. That would undermine their entire, utterly commercialized mindset.

The poor buggers have painted themselves into this corner and can’t see a way out.

Xi went to Russia, signed a joint statement with Putin about the importance of nuclear non-proliferation. Two days later – literally, two days – Putin moved nukes into Belarus, creating a new nuclear state in the world. The desire to humiliate Xi couldn’t possibly be more obvious.

One keeps hearing, “Asian people are so proud. The most important thing for them is not to lose face publicly.” What did Xi do when Putin casually made him look ineffectual and unnecessary after Xi went to the trouble of making a personal visit?

He swallowed and said, “thank you, sir.”

The belief that rich, strong countries always dominate the poorer, weaker ones is based on interiorized Marxism. In reality – as opposed to a materialist fantasy – it doesn’t work like that. Size truly doesn’t matter. What matters is whether you know that you have something amazing to offer the world. If you do, a barren little peninsula topples gigantic empires and a small island with weird weather makes the whole world speak its language.

The opposite is true, too. There are many examples of huge, powerful empires dismantling themselves because there’s no longer a feeling of purpose.

The CNN is literally fundraising for the Trump campaign:

Yes, they must be totally terrified of him getting elected to give him this amount of free air time and placing the chyron so that the donation number is highlighted.

Today I learned a new bureau-speak term for downsizing. It’s “right-sizing.”

I can’t tell you how annoyed I am by this weaselly “let’s not use negative terminology and pretend we are rah-rah happy” strategy.

I went to evaluate graduate student presentations today, and the presentation on the order of adjectives in a sentence (e.g. do you say “a red tasty fish” or “a tasty red fish”?) that I thought I’d find the most boring was actually the best of all. The grad student who did this research is so in love with his topic and is delivering it with such verve and joy that he had a small crowd next to his project at all times. There were projects that featured a small robot invented by a grad student, there was woodworking, really good art, all sorts of things. But people were mesmerized by the adjectives because the personality of the presenter was so big.

By the way, the mystery of the grad student whose research praises the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact has been revealed. Guess who she’s been rooming with for the past year? Yes, my Russian instructor. She says speaking to the Russian really helped her clarify her prospective on the evils of Baltic nationalisms.

Every form of power seeks legitimacy. There needs to be something that justifies the rule in the eyes of the ruled. The worst, bloodiest dictators make very sure they give something valuable to the people. They seek consent.

Franco stayed in power for 36 years because under his rule people’s standard of living soared. That’s where he derived his legitimacy. This economic miracle was created by the US, of course, but Franco made the US want to do it.

Pinochet made Chile the best functioning economy in South America, so for a while Chileans put up with the dead, the tortured, and the disappeared.

Stalin made “life better and more fun” (it’s a famous quote). He really did. There was a dramatic improvement in the standard of living. That was the source of his legitimacy.

No dictatorship survives on terror alone. There’s always an enthusiastic consent on the part of the people. Of course, the terror makes people more eager to grant consent but there still needs to be something they are getting out of it.

Putin is no Stalin or even Pinochet. There are no concentration camps, no mass torture, no blood-soaked stadiums, no Tontons Macoutes, no dead bodies strewn around every morning to keep the populace terrorized. So what’s his source of legitimacy? If even Stalin or Hitler with their hardcore repressive apparatuses needed to give something – a lot, actually – to remain legitimate, what does Putin give his people? There’s no improvement in the standard of living. Nothing remotely like what Franco, Stalin, or Pinochet gave their people. (Or, on the positive side of the political equation, what FDR gave Americans with the New Deal or Adenauer to post-war Germans).

So what are the Russians getting out of it? They are eagerly running off to die by the hundreds of thousands. It’s been decades since US presidents were able to give anything to the American people remotely worth this kind of dedication. Even Stalin didn’t immediately manage to get his people to sign on like this during WWII.

Look at it from the point of view of legitimacy of power, and things become very clear.

It is at times like these that I most acutely feel that I’ll never truly become an American. I just can’t comprehend why this Trump-related drama number five million isn’t insanely boring. It’s so repetitive. Everybody on either side has already said exactly what they are saying now on a gabizillion previous Trump-related occasions.

Why is being stuck in this loop a good use of one’s time? It can’t be entertaining because it’s always the same. It can’t be instructive or edifying. It’s a time and energy drain with no reward. Even the second round of the academic Hunger Games I’m participating in today is more useful. At least, I can try to save a job. Keep the lab open. Get my students their free tutor back. And the people who squandered their energy on this ridiculous Trump drama won’t be able to fight as hard.

OK, I think I just answered my own question. Never mind.

Maybe I should do more complaining because otherwise people don’t know how bad it’s gotten in public higher education.

This is what happened two weeks ago, for example. We usually hire graduate students to serve as TAs and GAs. They teach lower-level sections, help with research, work at our labs, provide free tutoring, etc. There is a stable number of these graduate hires each department makes year after year. In Chemistry, for example, graduate students teach 28 sections of Intro Chem. Without them, the department collapses.

Graduate students expect to be hired for these jobs when they apply. It’s part of the package they are offered. At my university, graduate students don’t get tuition waivers if they aren’t employed as teaching assistants. So if we don’t offer these jobs, grad school enrollments plummet.

So this year the new neoliberal administrator decided that the number of graduate students we can hire should be cut by 75%. This makes zero financial sense but having fewer employees us always good, right?

Department Chairs were gathered and told that we have to battle it out with each other for the remaining 25% of graduate students we’ll be allowed to hire.

You can imagine what happened. Losing this many workers is potentially catastrophic for many departments. It was total Hunger Games. Of course, who’s going to win in that kind of situation?

People who can yell the loudest.

People who have no inhibitions and no qualms about publicly destroying a colleague from another department.

People who have a commanding presence, a loud voice, and who lack a strong accent in English.

People who happen to be close friends (or who look aesthetically pleasing to) high-ranking administrators.

If, however, you are on a quieter side, maybe somewhat introverted or timid, guess what? Your department is screwed. Other people tear off a huge chunk of the loot and you go home hungry. And it’s not just you who loses, which would be more bearable. It’s all the people who are working at your department and who need you to bring back a decent number of these graduate students.

In the end, people start hating each other for being more successful at this game. Group solidarity is broken. Suspicion sets in. Why did that person get more than I did? Something shady must be going on. Graduate students who were admitted under the expectation of having a job and a tuition waiver suddenly lose both one or two semesters in. And you have to look at their stunned, scared faces and know that it’s your fault because you didn’t yell louder or eviscerate another Chair in front of everyone.

So yeah. It’s bad.

I’m bringing this from under the password protection because people seem not to know about this.

Usually, tenured professors teach a certain number of courses per semester under their contract. At my university, the teaching load is 3:3, meaning 3 courses per semester, which is high.

In reality, however, many people teach up to 6 courses per semester. If your course is underenrolled, you either consent to teach it for free, or it gets cancelled. In many cases, cancelling the only section of an advanced course means students don’t graduate on time. If the program is already struggling, this can pretty much put the whole program under the threat of extinction. So people consent (and actually beg) to teach up to twice their contractual load because they can’t face letting down the students and want to save the program.

I make the schedule for my department, and I keep asking my faculty members, “Are you sure you want me to do it? These are 6 courses I’m scheduling for you in the Fall. Are you sure?” And yes, they are sure because they don’t have a choice. We don’t have this issue in Spanish but in French, German and Chinese, it’s what always happens. On one occasion, my German faculty member taught a whopping 7 (seven) courses in a semester. He’s a Full Professor, and his contractual teaching load is 3.

We used to have lecturers, TAs, adjuncts. But it’s all gone. This poor German professor is doing the job that we used to spread among 3-4 people.

It’s worse in Physics, though. Those guys are really suffering.