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.

In the late 1980s – early 1990s, post-Soviet people sold burned out lightbulbs in the market because they were in high demand.

Can anybody guess why?

Gary Gerstle explains that back in the 1990s, when the IT revolution was beginning, the Republican Newt Gingrich was the Silicon Valley’s greatest cheerleader. But the techie entrepreneurs were put off by the Republicans’ belief in morality. They wanted freedom not only from government regulation of industry but also freedom from any constraint. This is why the tech industries are today so woke.

Of course, people who are wealthy and extremely disciplined can withstand a lack of external constraints because they create their own with the help of a platoon of expensive specialists they can hire. For people who don’t have the money, the discipline or a very high intellect, this kind of freedom is quite literally deadly. We can see that in the plummeting life expectancy, deaths of despair, the soaring opioid addiction, etc.

Gary Gerstle defines a political order as a state of affairs

when the opposition acquiesces to an order’s ideological and policy imperatives.

The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order

By this measure – and I think it’s a correct one – we are already living in a woke political order.