Wisdom = Plutocracy? That’s What Plutocratic Academia Has Been Teaching By Example. Low Rung Academic Workers Exploited

US academia all too often looks like a criminal enterprise to rip off students with US government  complicity.  What a worthy educational system we have.  The depraved angle below I have long kept up my sleeve: I have extensive personal experience from it. I observed that most, otherwise tops, professors’ souls were ruined by it… Ruined souls don’t make for superior wisdom.

I was employed by US Academia and contributed financially, cognitively, and with my work to three prestigious universities (Columbia, Stanford, UC Berkeley). I was horrendously exploited… To the point it’s too painful to describe… But at least I can approach the subject… And I was not the only one, but more like the rule. Since those rough times, things have changed, the low rung employees of academia, after decades of struggle have finally been allowed to unionize. However the struggle is far from finished. The situation is so gory that even the Wall Street Journal, not usually tender footed about low lives, is indignant about it… and rightly so. 

Before showing the editorial of the WSJ, let me jump to conclusions: top academia is paid fortunes. One could say: because they are geniuses. However, closer inspections show that top academia is more into looking good than being good: much effort is spent socially rather than intellectually. Research papers and ideas often come from the lower rungs, not the gleaming summits. My opinion is that the system selects, all too much, for bad top academicians, deliberately, individuals more interested by greed than brains. My friend Feynman arrived at the same conclusion (and resigned from Academia)… A recent paper from PNAS (Academy of Science) showed that the flurry of papers in top fields produced increasingly bad research… Something known for a while: years ago, US biotech companies had found that only 11% of research results, in peer review, were reproducible.

This system is no accident. It is more like a vast conspiracy. As Major General Butler wrote in his 1935 book War Is a Racket…  Academia is a racket. Consider the following editorial of the Wall Street Journal:

“United Auto Workers of the Ivy League.

A brawl over pay at Columbia challenges academic solidarity with the working class. By The Editorial Board. Updated Dec. 18, 2021 4:22 pm ET

What do Deere & Co. and Columbia University have in common? Their workers are represented by the United Auto Workers and have gone on strike this fall seeking higher compensation. Yet the contrasts are instructive about the state of higher education.

Many Columbia class sections have been canceled since early November, and final grades have been thrown in jeopardy due to a seven-week strike by the Student Workers of Columbia-UAW, which includes 3,000 graduates and undergraduates who assist with teaching, grading and tutoring. Columbia recently told undergrads they could choose to receive a pass-fail in any course this semester in “appreciation of how difficult this term may have been for you.” …

While workers at companies like Volkswagen and Amazon have rejected unions, Big Labor is winning with university employees. Last week the UAW was recognized as labor representative for 17,000 student researchers at the University of California. About a quarter (100,000) of UAW members are university employees.

***

It’s worth reflecting on why unions are having more success on campus. No doubt academic workers are liberal. But it’s also true that they are often treated poorly by universities to support high-earning administrators and tenured faculty.

Consider Columbia, where many student workers earn little more than New York City’s $15 hourly minimum wage. Columbia this spring offered to raise its minimum hourly wage to $17, and the salary of doctoral candidates with 12-month teaching appointments to $42,350. Students rejected the proposal. Columbia’s latest offer is $20 an hour and $43,621 for full-year positions.

The UAW wants $45,000 for 12-month appointments and a minimum $26 hourly rate for non-salaried workers, with annual increases. The union says a single adult had to make at least $45,285 to live in Manhattan in June 2020—before this year’s inflation.

“Columbia made $3.1 billion in returns on its investments this past year alone,” the union says, adding that its demands for a three-year contract would amount to a mere “3% of its increase in net assets from investments.” Columbia charges $63,530 in undergraduate tuition and fees ($82,584 including room and board), which over four years is as much as the cost of a house. President Lee Bollinger earns roughly $4.6 million, and full-time professors make on average $268,400. 

It’s fair to ask why the university can’t afford to pay student workers—many of whom are being buried in debt that they may never be able to repay—more given they do much of the teaching and grading.

The university has nonetheless held firm and last week warned that striking workers might not be offered positions this spring. The union has accused the university of retaliation and filed unfair labor practice charges with the National Labor Relations Board. Columbia says it is offering PhD students “one of the most generous packages of any university in the country.”

… you have to smile at what the Marxists might call the contradictions of academic production. When Kellogg Co. last week threatened to replace striking workers, President Biden called it “an existential attack on the union and its members’ jobs and livelihoods.” Deere and Kellogg pay their factory workers more than Columbia does its academic grunts. Kellogg says most workers at its cereal factories earned $120,000 last year.

Democrats seem less perturbed by the Ivy League school’s hardball bargaining. … encouraging the university “to strengthen its efforts in good faith bargaining.”

Columbia’s faculty have also professed solidarity with student workers, which costs nothing. But they haven’t stepped in to help deliver the education for which undergrads are paying a small fortune. Deere and Kellogg used salaried workers to keep their plants running during union strikes. Is it too much to ask tenured professors to grade exams?

Companies that underpay workers and mistreat customers won’t survive long. But universities with brand names have a captive clientele as well as steady subsidies in the form of federal student loans. This is why many were able to get away with keeping classes remote last year without discounting tuition.

The next time you hear professors lecture about inequality in America, ask them about the state of the academic working class.”

Well, I have done just that when I was in the midst of it all. It were as if I lunched in public on dogs poop for all to see and smell: the repulsion I inspired was without compare with any sort of contempt I have seen anywhere… about anybody.

***

The main teaching of academia as a plutocratic system is to teach plutocracy is good. And the best way to do that is to teach by example… This is what Aristotle did, teaching monarchy (a sort of ultimate plutocracy and oligarchy) as the best form of government. 

Teaching that plutocracy is good means teaching that greed, inequality, inequity, oligarchy and the exploitation of lower classes by higher classes, are the essence of goodness. No better place to show that explicitly, and for all to see, than academia.

Things have improved. When I was in academia I saw extreme abuse akin to slavery, chronically and systematically. All the way to murder (at Stanford, of all places!) I knew very well some of the victims and some of the perpetrators (some of whom got the highest honors, in more than one country). 

Perelman, the top mathematician who was involved directly with some of the same characters I initially innocently befriended, left mathematics as a result. He said he did not want to cause a scandal… (The article I linked to presented Yau and Hawking as friends… they were not. Yau despised Hawking… wrongly so, and i told him.)

In a sense I was even more silent… especially as nobody need to listen to me, nor wanted to. But now, if even the WSJ  talks about it… I may as well lift some of the veil.

None of this is an accident. The present university system is rotten to the core: it teaches delirious hypocrisy and exploitation is the way of wisdom, and to wisdom. No, it’s the way of plutocracy. But such is the goal of present day academia: teaching that plutocracy = wisdom. This is one of the reasons why major dangers, such as the rise of dictators (roughly equivalent and related to the rise of plutocracy), the danger of nuclear war, and the climate catastrophe, have been under-appreciated. This is also why major opportunities were passed… But it is not too late to learn… and the situation has improved: low rung educators can now unionize in top universities…

Patrice Ayme  

Exploiting intellectual workers out of greed is not wise, and the road to hell, because it ensures that it will select for the worst.

Teaching The Dark Side Subconsciously

How Respect For Infamy Subconsciously Taught

Does USA Academia Teach Respect for Wealth & the Leader Principle?

In a society, institutions teach insidiously the subconscious often more efficiently than what they profess officially. Precisely because, being insidious, the “teaching” is subconscious, surreptitious, thus undefended against.

American Academia teaches the Leader Principle (Hitler’s Fuerer Prinzip in German) in subtle ways.

One way to do that is to give a human being’s name to prestigious chairs. Then proudly, firmly and very officially, it is announced, often by the beneficiary himself, that said beneficiary of the Chair is “The Blah Blah Von Bloh Bloh Bloh Professor of Such and Such at the University of This and That”).

Thus, the impression is imprinted on teenagers that it is by the good grace of someone extremely wealthy that the professing professor seems to have been created. Hence wealth creates intellectual, academic authority.

French Soldiers United Nations Mandated, Central African Republic 2013

[French soldiers were killed in combat in the CAR, while stopping a huge civil war/holocaust in the making; All the more a reason to act well, with nothing to hide.]

One can instill reverence for money in a myriad of related ways. Buildings get named according to wealthy individuals or corporations. The (self-described) “best” universities flaunt their wealth, in billions of dollars (they call that wealth “endowment”).

Better: one can force students to pay “tuition” which is of the order of the average family income. Thus wealth, and wealth only, makes access to knowledge and wisdom possible.

(Some will object that there are scholarships given on merit, or “racial”, ethnic, or gender reasons. However, the fact remains that even the scholarship are processed, loud and clear according to wealth distributed.)

The “Leader Principle” is continuously taught in the USA. The paradox is that a real democracy is ruled by the People, not leaders. So the very prominence of the Leader Principle admits that democracy is secondary.

How To Avoid War Crimes:

Some soldiers in the French Army were accused in a secret United Nations report of sex abuse against some boys in the Central Africa Republic (CAR) during the on-going Operation Sangaris. The report was leaked to the French Military by a UN official, and the French immediately started an enquiry.

Now it has become a huge affair. The UN heavily depends upon the French Military to intervene all over Africa, ever since French paratroopers blocked the Cuban army from invading Congo (wars Shaba I and II), and engaged in spectacular operations such as the rescue of Kolwezi.

16 soldiers are involved (and, apparently, only 4 of them French, contrarily to what journalists in England claimed; others were Africans, yet still under the UN Mandate).

In any case, full light will be made: the French Republic recognizes the authority of the International Criminal Court for war crimes committed by its own soldiers.

Overall, the greatest difference between the Western democracies and their enemies in the Twentieth Century, was that they (mostly) did not engage in war crimes.

Perhaps the greatest crime was committed in Algeria in 1945, when the French engaged in a crack-down against would-be independentists (or just ex-soldiers who wanted full rights). This did not work well, as ultimately, as a result of this (war) crime, a terrible civil war happened in France and Algeria (which is basically unresolved to this day!)

Right, the French engaged in torture in Algeria (but that was entirely excusable). Right, the USA engaged in massacres in Vietnam (but the most famous such massacre, My-Lai, was prosecuted). Right, the greatest crime of the USA in Vietnam, clearly a massive war crime, the usage of Agent Orange, was abominable (one million were killed, disabled, or severely affected). But it can be argued that these dangers were not clear at the time (the British had used defoliants during the Malaysian Emergency, without a significant outcry).

And of course the British, French and Americans had been pretty rough with the Nazis in 1944-45, to the point the Nazis had whined about it. Surrendering to Americans was difficult, they tended to shoot until there was obvious peace; the British fired-bombed cities… But, there again, the Nazis had got it all started. The first raid in Germany, a raid on Berlin, by French Naval aviation, was a direct retaliation to Nazi attacks on French cities…

The USA has gone, though, the other way, in recent years. Obvious war crimes in Iraq were covered-up for all to see. And the USA does not recognize the authority of the International Criminal Court.

Too bad Obama did not have the guts, and brains, to even try to change these things, when he (supposedly) controlled the politics of the USA, six years ago.

Instead, those who reveal the crimes were prosecuted. This subconsciously teaches the world that it is OK for violence to be used criminally by authority in the USA. And thus by any authority, anywhere in the world. And then even by those who have no authority.

Why & How Humans Think

To answer why humans think is often conducive to find out how they think.

Human beings, when they think creatively, can think bottom up, or top down.

Most of the time, of course, humans do not bother to think creatively: they just learn by rote what they have heard, and sounds good to be integrated in the peer group that presents itself, or that they have chosen.

Bottom up thinking is thinking from practice: the hand makes the brain (even Heidegger figured that one out).

Animals Too Can Fight For Freedom Beyond What Most Humans Would Do

Top down thinking starts from axioms. It’s creative, but only if one makes one’s own axioms. It is intellectual fascism, if the axioms are given by fascist thought system (one animated by the Leader Principle).

We need guinea pigs to experiment on. The best subjects are those who think for a penny, the professors who grace academia. As their final product is supposed to be thinking, thinking they are supposed to exhibit.

They know this, so they try to hide, by drowning the fish in the water: a typical scientific, psycho, socio, medical or philosophical paper tends to use hermetic jargon, rich with a barrage of references, automatically obscure (by contrast, Einstein’s breakthrough papers had basically no references).

Our subject here is going to be Brian Key. In his essay “Why Fishes (likely) Do Not Feel Pain”.

Professor Key started, with axioms setting up the mood he wanted us to have: animals are machines; wolves’ behavior can be duplicated with computer programs, fishes don’t suffer pain, because they fight the hook, whereas clever mammals trapped, give up.

Pop ethology presents with silly axioms. Predators trapped by a leg have been known to chew it off.

Fish on a line do give up in the end, when they have no more will (although they still have some strength, as they flap around when brought on a boat and speared).

Brian Key claims one needs a cortex to suffer pain. Reptiles and birds have no cortex, and they suffer pain. http://www.wiringthebrain.com/2010/09/ancient-origins-of-cerebral-cortex.html

How did Brian’s brain get so silly? Because he reasoned top down that “it does not feel like anything to be a fish”, as he put it. So then he looked for structures in fish similar to those known to be associated to pain in humans.

Naturally, he did not find them. Birds have brains that are organized completely differently from ours, although our common ancestors are around 240 million years ago. Fishes, separated by another 200 million years more, are going to be even more mysterious.

The cortex is over-valued: conductivity modulation by glial cells occur along axons, for example. That means that “white matter” also “thinks”.

It has been notoriously difficult to find out how birds’ brains work. Still, some bird species score possibly higher in some mental ways than any primate, but man.

Generally, understanding life is difficult. It’s even impossible without Quantum Physics: a plant captures sunlight in one femtosecond. The rapport of a femtosecond to a second is the same at the rapport of one second to 31 million years. Crucially photosynthesis depends upon electrons being in many places, at the same time.

So, Brian, please, don’t tell me how it feels to be a fish. You don’t know. As many academics, you are more busy posing to advance your career. It’s OK, it helps, but it should be taken with a grain of salt.

Attributing to animal brains the same general purpose that our brains have is just common sense. It is not forming the world according to man (anthropo-morphizing). It is just the most natural explanation, the most economical one, too (“Ockham Razor”).

Telling us one can think of wolves differently, like machines, show a will to impel on us the mood to the notion that animals are machines. When human hunters go out after game, they use the same tactic, as described by Brian, not because we can think of them as simple computer program, but because it is the smartest strategy to follow.

Common sense is found in computer programs, written in wolf and human brains, or on paper, because sense is common.

And brains are into making sense. By the way, dear Brian, computer programs are written by humans, and, apparently, wolves. This is all you have demonstrated.

In “Diving Into Truth“, I pointed out that fishes known to be clever, groupers, are found to recruit complementary predators to hunt. Other fishes do this. The idea is to find a predator such as a Moray Eel to get in cracks and caves. The eel understands this, and the grouper makes a suggestive dance and mimic to get the eel into action.

Since I wrote the initial article linked above, other species of fish have been found to also suggest transpacific cooperation to fetch food.

Any trout fisher will tell you that old trouts are very smart. You can put the juiciest morsel in front of them, once they know it’s an ape who proposes dinner, they won’t bite.

Meanwhile, back from the Kremlin, Merkel faulted the Russians in Ukraine. Ukraine President Petro Poroshenko exhibited passport and military identification papers of Russian officers, “found inside Ukraine, killing Ukrainians”. The border was now “swarming with Russian tanks, armed personnel carriers, multiple rocket launchers and ammunition.” He added: “We find Russian officers, in tanks full of ammunition, who claim to be lost, one hundred kilometers from their border, killing Ukrainians.”

“After the talks yesterday in Moscow that the French president and I had, it is uncertain if it will succeed, Merkel said, “but it is my view and the French president’s view [that it’s] definitely worth trying. We owe it to the people affected in Ukraine, at the very least.”

The French president had a less sanguine angle: “If we don’t find not just a compromise but a lasting peace agreement [accord de paix durable], we know perfectly well what the scenario will be. It has a name, it’s called war,” Hollande told journalists in his city of Tulle, in central France.

Putin backtracked right away, in full Hitlerian disingenuous style: “We don’t intend to war with anyone. We intend to cooperate with all.”

Wonderful. How and why we think is at its best, when survival is a stake.

Patrice Ayme’