- sudo-discuss - sudoroom.org

infosec job for activist nonprofit in India

by Candace Lazarou

Anybody feel familiar enough with the wiley ways the Indian government likes to snoop around? I work for a nonprofit that helps local folks fight destructive dam projects, and though I'm working with an infosec consultant to create a general policy and guidelines, our Indian office is looking for someone with experience in the region to help them specifically. If so, lemme know

10 years, 5 months

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Does Sudoroom need a 24 port Cisco switch?

by Patrick O'Doherty

Specifically model number: SLM2024T-NA. $dayjob is looking to give one to a good home, and figured sudoroom might be interested in receiving it. p

10 years, 5 months

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magnetic stripe cards / gift cards / writer or encoder?

by Matthew Senate

Hey all, Anyone have a magnetic stripe card writer (encoder)? What about magnetic stripe cards? Especially the type used for gift cards and debit/credit cards! Need for omni access!!! // Matt

10 years, 6 months

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wearable tech?

by We The People

Are there any innovators on this list and/or associated with Omni who are into wearable tech? I'd love to talk with you, especially if you have an interest in "high tech fashion." This seems unlikely to me, but I never know...someone might be out there. judi

10 years, 6 months

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Invoice 1152 from Omni Oakland

by Omni Oakland

Dear Sudo Room, Here's your invoice! We appreciate your prompt payment. Thanks for your business! Omni Oakland ------------------------ Invoice Summary -------------------------- Invoice # : 1152 Invoice Date: 10/08/2015 Due Date: 10/23/2015 Terms: Net 15 Amount Due: $393.92 The complete version has been provided as an attachment to this email. ---------------------------------------------------------------------

10 years, 6 months

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Invoice 1149 from Omni Oakland

by Omni Oakland

Dear Sudo Room, Here's your invoice! We appreciate your prompt payment. Thanks for your business! Omni Oakland ------------------------ Invoice Summary -------------------------- Invoice # : 1149 Invoice Date: 10/08/2015 Due Date: 10/23/2015 Terms: Net 15 Amount Due: $368.35 The complete version has been provided as an attachment to this email. ---------------------------------------------------------------------

10 years, 6 months

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Fwd: RIP Jeremiah Young -- poem

by johanna faust

in case you missed it ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: johanna faust <female.faust(a)gmail.com> Date: Fri, Oct 9, 2015 at 7:38 PM Subject: Re: [sudo-discuss] RIP Jeremiah Young To: Jake <jake(a)spaz.org> i was just meditating on that symbol, wondering about the eights. it might even have been on the evening of the sixth, or seventh. thank you jeremiah. well said. hope you found yours. hope i find mine. *to jeremiah, who died just before we met, i think* a friend of a friend upon whom did depend all manner of things now set free a few days ago through some people i know wrote some words that managed to reach me after he died, after he died between that moment and this one he died everything strange no doubt rearranged but how could it be, to me how is it this way for me? that each separate word nevermore to be heard as should be, said by him, properly now only in silence in the mind of a stranger speaks as soon enough mine will, for me. On Fri, Oct 9, 2015 at 2:38 PM, Jake <jake(a)spaz.org> wrote: > My friend died! This is how it goes. > > this is a post he made on October 5th. What does it mean? I don't know. > > > https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10205260075765654&set=a.22035830133… > > Jeremiah Young > October 5 at 9:53am > > Eight. A pair of squares. Eight is two times two times two, and as such is > the first cubic number after one. As the number of vertices of a cube or > faces of its dual, the octahedron, eight is complete. At the molecular > level this is displayed by atoms, which long to have a full octave of eight > electrons in their outermost shell. A sulphur atom has six electrons in > their outermost shell, so eight atoms get together to share electrons, > forming an octagonal sulphur ring. Eight is also the next Fibonacci number > after five. Within architecture the octogon often signifies the transition > between Heaven and Earth, as a bridge between the square and the circle. A > spherical dome often surmounts a cubic structure by way of a beautiful > octagonal vault. Eight is particularly revered in the religion and > mythology of the orient. The ancient Chinese oracle, the I-Ching, is based > on combinations of eight trigrams, each the result of a twofold choice > between a broken (yin) or an unbroken (yang) line, made three times. > Depicted opposite is the 'Former Heaven Sequence', said to represent the > ideal pattern of transformations in the cosmos. Notice how each trigram is > the complement of its opposite. Echoing these ancient Chinese pairs, the > modern world is full of computers which think in units called 'bytes', each > made of eight binary 'bits'. In a seven-tone scale the eighth note is the > octave, twice the pitch of the first note, and so signals the movement to a > new level. This may be why, in religious symbolism, the eighth step is > often associated with spiritual evolution or salvation. > > _______________________________________________ > sudo-discuss mailing list > sudo-discuss(a)lists.sudoroom.org > https://sudoroom.org/lists/listinfo/sudo-discuss > -- *Be seeing you.* -- *Be seeing you.*

10 years, 6 months

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Copper foil

by Cere Mona Davis

Does anyone have a small amount of copper foil I can haz? Thanks Cere

10 years, 6 months

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[job] Chief Information Officer, City of Oakland

by Vicky Knox

Let's get a hacker into this position of POWER!! The closing date for applications is November 8th. http://bit.ly/1FStng9 <http://t.co/3VklMkLEnB>

10 years, 6 months

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Re: [sudo-discuss] [sudo-info] Tracksoar weather balloon tracker

by danarauz＠gmail.com

Hello Michael, I am forwarding your email to our Sudoroom's discuss email list. Thank you and good luck in your project! Daniel On Sat, Oct 10, 2015 at 12:30 PM, Michael Bales <beta(a)tracksoar.com> wrote: > Hello Fellow Makers/Hackers, > > My name is Mike Bales and I’m the co-founder of the Santa Barbara > Hackerspace. > > We’re about to launch our very first Kickstarter Campaign / product, the > Tracksoar APRS tracker, and I thought it may be of interest to you / your > group. The Tracksoar is the smallest open source APRS tracker available. I > designed it for high altitude weather balloons, but it also works very well > with model rockets, RC planes / helicopters, really anything that flies. > > Thank you for your time, If you are interested please visit our > Kickstarter campaign at: > www.kickstarter.com/projects/1250163085/tracksoar-aprs > or our home page here: tracksoar.com > > Thank you for your time and consideration. > > If you have any question, please contact me at beta(a)tracksoar.com or > 805-2HACKED (805-242-2533) > > > _______________________________________________ > Info mailing list > Info(a)lists.sudoroom.org > https://sudoroom.org/lists/listinfo/info > > -- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Help open a people-powered common space in Oakland, California! https://omnicommons.org/donate - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

10 years, 6 months

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RIP Jeremiah Young

by Jake

My friend died! This is how it goes. this is a post he made on October 5th. What does it mean? I don't know. https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10205260075765654&set=a.22035830133… Jeremiah Young October 5 at 9:53am Eight. A pair of squares. Eight is two times two times two, and as such is the first cubic number after one. As the number of vertices of a cube or faces of its dual, the octahedron, eight is complete. At the molecular level this is displayed by atoms, which long to have a full octave of eight electrons in their outermost shell. A sulphur atom has six electrons in their outermost shell, so eight atoms get together to share electrons, forming an octagonal sulphur ring. Eight is also the next Fibonacci number after five. Within architecture the octogon often signifies the transition between Heaven and Earth, as a bridge between the square and the circle. A spherical dome often surmounts a cubic structure by way of a beautiful octagonal vault. Eight is particularly revered in the religion and mythology of the orient. The ancient Chinese oracle, the I-Ching, is based on combinations of eight trigrams, each the result of a twofold choice between a broken (yin) or an unbroken (yang) line, made three times. Depicted opposite is the 'Former Heaven Sequence', said to represent the ideal pattern of transformations in the cosmos. Notice how each trigram is the complement of its opposite. Echoing these ancient Chinese pairs, the modern world is full of computers which think in units called 'bytes', each made of eight binary 'bits'. In a seven-tone scale the eighth note is the octave, twice the pitch of the first note, and so signals the movement to a new level. This may be why, in religious symbolism, the eighth step is often associated with spiritual evolution or salvation.

10 years, 6 months

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Internet Archive event: Building Libraries Together

by Vicky Knox

You're invited to a giant party at the Internet Archive! Wednesday, October 21, 2015 from 6:00 PM to 10:00 PM 300 Funston Avenue San Francisco, CA 94118 Register here: http://www.eventbrite.com/e/building-libraries-together-tickets-18896247184 ~~ BUILDING LIBRARIES TOGETHER: Celebrating the Passionate People Building the Internet Archive - 6 p.m. Reception & Hands-On Demos - 7 p.m. Program begins Come honor our partners--the hackers and historians making amazing things with the Internet Archive’s collections. And we’ll present the first Internet Archive Hero Award to the Grateful Dead--Pioneers in Sharing Come try these Hands-on Demos: - SCAN a book with our next generation Scribe - LISTEN to a vintage recording - EXPLORE political TV ads and funny films - PLAY a 3-D video game with the Oculus Rift - VIEW Grateful Dead memorabilia - ENJOY free food, drink and music! PLEASE JOIN US FOR the Internet Archive’s Biggest Event of the Year!

10 years, 6 months

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No Omni delegates meeting today?

by Patrik D'haeseleer

Our CCL delegate can't find anyone in the building... There's a delegates meeting listed on the calendar: https://omnicommons.org/calendar/events/omni-general-assembly-2015-10-08/ But the riseup pad seems to suggest the next one is on the 15th: https://pad.riseup.net/p/omninom Patrik

10 years, 6 months

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Fwd: [sudo-info] [Declaration of Intent to Join] robohat

by danarauz＠gmail.com

Forwarding to discuss list. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Sudo Room <info(a)sudoroom.org> Date: Wed, Oct 7, 2015 at 6:09 PM Subject: [sudo-info] [Declaration of Intent to Join] robohat To: info(a)sudoroom.org (Pseudo)nym or Name: robohat Email: freefavors(a)gmail.com Why do you want to be a member of sudo room?: Because I like hackin, rackin, and frackin!! If you know already, what are you excited to do at sudo room?: maybe working together on projects, and getting better at computer coding, internet of things , robots, ai..etc If you know already, what are you excited to share with the sudo room community?: my time. Have you ever been banned from another hackerspace? If so, when and why?: no _______________________________________________ Info mailing list Info(a)lists.sudoroom.org https://sudoroom.org/lists/listinfo/info -- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Help open a people-powered common space in Oakland, California! https://omnicommons.org/donate - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

10 years, 6 months

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Re: [sudo-discuss] Key policy

by yar

On Tue, Oct 6, 2015 at 10:48 AM, Patrick O'Doherty <p(a)trickod.com> wrote: > is there any particular reason you'd like a physical key over the > equivalent RFID token? I sometimes need to open the building and take responsibility for events. I participate in organizing and maintaining the building. See the criteria here: https://omnicommons.org/wiki/Keys

10 years, 6 months

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Nerds for Nature Summit [Oct 17]

by Vicky Knox

fyi.. http://www.eventbrite.com/e/nerds-for-nature-summit-tickets-18110605308 Nerd for Nature's <http://nerdsfornature.org/> mission is to bring together technologists and environmental professionals to collaboratively build awesome tools that help us understand, protect, and revive the natural world. We launched in 2013 to a sold-out crowd. We mind mapped <http://blog.nerdsfornature.org/post/46177287870/nerds-for-nature-mind-map> and discovered a whole community of nature nerds eager to learn, collaborate, and build. Since then we’ve bioblitzed <http://blog.nerdsfornature.org/post/51050945065/mclaren-bioblitz-success>, monitored landscape changes <http://nerdsfornature.org/monitor-change/>, deployed drones for science <http://blog.nerdsfornature.org/post/98202275419/prototyping-our-future>, measured air quality, and more. Recently we expanded to include Nerds for Nature: Silicon Valley. Now we want your help to envision the next chapter in Nerds for Nature. Join us for an interactive, social evening full of interesting people sharing ideas for what creative tech and design can do for the environmental movement. We’ll kick things off with several lightning talks about successful Nerds collaborations. We’ll then work together to create our next mind map! The more ideas, suggestions, and creativity the better. Whether you’ve been with us for awhile or this will be your first event -- we’re excited to hear from you! *Location:* Manylabs,1086 Folsom St, San Francisco, CA 94103 *Time:* 3pm-5pm / doors open at 2:30pm and there'll be time for mingling afterward Please sign up for the waiting list, even if the tickets sell out! And if you’ve RSVP’d but cannot attend, please remove your name so that someone else may take your spot.

10 years, 6 months

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Wednesday "Immersive Afternoon: Organising without Bosses"

by Pete Forsyth

Hi all, I just learned of this workshop, run by people from Enspiral: Enspiral <http://www.enspiral.com/> is a collaborative network of over 260 professionals and 18 social enterprises headquartered in Wellington (New Zealand), with nodes in other locations around the country and internationally. It exists to create a system of work where people can focus their energies on what is most meaningful to them – solving the biggest problems of our time. I thought this might be an excellent opportunity to somebody from Omni. I have the sense that Enspiral has accomplished much of what Omni aspires to, and may have valuable lessons. The workshop costs $40. There's also one on Monday (tomorrow) in SF. If you want to attend, you should RSVP ASAP -- last I heard it's possible they will cancel one or both due to low sign-up. And if the cost is prohibitive to somebody who really sees value in Omni to attending, let me know -- I could pitch in. Since I'm not on the Omni list, I hope somebody will forward this! -Pete [[User:Peteforsyth]]

10 years, 6 months

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Re: [sudo-discuss] [omni-discuss] missing mac charger

by Laura Turiano

I found a Mac charger on the main table in Sudo. Does this belong to anyone? On 10/6/15 3:43 PM, Chloe Minervini wrote: > I'll keep an eye out! I also misplaced a small real tree jacket then. > If anyone sees it let me know please! > > Best, > Chloe > > On Tuesday, October 6, 2015, Laura Turiano <scylla(a)riseup.net > <mailto:scylla@riseup.net>> wrote: > > I couldn't find my macbook charger after Becoming Omni on Sunday. > I'm wondering if anyone has come across it since then? > > <3 Laura > _______________________________________________ > discuss mailing list > discuss(a)lists.omnicommons.org > https://omnicommons.org/lists/listinfo/discuss >

10 years, 6 months

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trying to fix the door card reader....

by Morgan Allen

can anyone suggest how the electric strike is wired? Robb and I are trying to get it to open with little success. -- http://ithoughtyouweretherobot.com Metal and Wire http://nolonelyguineapigs.com/ Wandering and Rambling http://morglog.org Old and Neglected. -----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK----- Version: OpenPGP.js v.1.20121007 Comment: http://openpgpjs.org xsBNBFG3btUBB/9+/WJNOSIuc/praKPaPOweqXV5s7PGRD+HAnNWF/19YAY3 AFtfeoelhhY4sMJoobTaJzcZojznZ1kl/7UuuYCnbJO3Z9kaSMVrVxEZMSLe YmW8Hc4ZsTnl9f05DQFy8ABpAvMLmXJQXh63BbfzjFqNbSWQfLhrubSM2Elq xmN6EsmRyAuEeYlSnal+Di2MlViohpCbbagE2D6AZTUECIamTib6+DuLG4XO b4GGKHR9TXu2qS1VH6hqcvdEz2MDE5OqZzAnBgcF2dvcOdTk9gAOoR1T+qKj IJtg2X0ETbxcPqEXQoXE8VrxN0MLT5JQKTg26+csU4P2w0rEWsUsJombABEB AAHNJU1vcmdhbiBBbGxlbiA8bW9yZ2FucmFsbGVuQGdtYWlsLmNvbT7CwFwE EAECABAFAlG3btwJEG9pFLKaVEfeAAD7hwf+K8LN/kfgi8GTRLiTcuM+hSbm uAeiBY+VaJIQFLzoFlt8A0hBlLNPFNNmUDxdPrMErdHgZ7HtJW/6RANuBTti 5hr3EBguH1GQyK7BbUqJGvaEX4UNRej3uyX3ufXDsIB/3NsKaTyyu+SO0+Hv Cn2DwmlfSXcPhoarx6Turizn/WwgtTN3tqrMWxxiCKWydLH5xYuz+23BLMdc oF/zkbF+7ddFhmyfiFh4Ej9//tsfwPj2cACU3uLTrcwCo7IxUtkrqMF/fhlm LEqjhzDDjq9v7GNWb/5xB2xgTaucJ7/ljuS8nPlZqwCI8NlTgSqC8nyVLyjS yVtOzkItcS0UqyW1Mg== =V/Ia -----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----

10 years, 6 months

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stuff!

by Jake

https://mobile.twitter.com/ChrisStumph/status/651467135537975296 @sudoroom Any interest in a garage full of old radio gear? Been informed it’s going to the dump otherwise: https://cloudup.com/cIxs99zBOqz 11:40am - 6 Oct 15

10 years, 6 months

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Re: [sudo-discuss] Freesorces - free resources listing for SF

by Vicky Knox

This is awesome! I just created a San Francisco LocalWiki article <https://localwiki.org/sf/Free_resources> linking to the PDF. On a similar vein, the Oakland Wiki has an article on all things free <https://oaklandwiki.org/Free> (free eats, dental care, festivals, etc.).

10 years, 6 months

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pork rinds

by Candace Lazarou

If I take a bucket of pork rinds bigger than your head to sudo, will somebody eat it or will everyone be grossed out?

10 years, 6 months

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towing dolly

by johanna faust

does anyone have a towing dolly to lend ? time sensitive. -- *Be seeing you.*

10 years, 6 months

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Key policy

by yar

Omni has a new front door, the locks have been changed, and our new key policy is in effect: https://omnicommons.org/wiki/Event:2015/05/07_Weekly_Delegates_Meeting#Prop… Any member will be allowed to have a key card, but Sudoroom still has to decide who gets a hard key. Should we give one to every member who wants one? Should members have to specifically ask at a meeting? For the record, I want one.

10 years, 6 months

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How The American University was Killed, in Five Easy Steps | The Homeless Adjunct

by Romy Ilano

Ouch! Interesting read https://junctrebellion.wordpress.com/2012/08/12/how-the-american-university… How The American University was Killed, in Five Easy Steps A few years back, Paul E. Lingenfelter began his report on the defunding of public education by saying, “In 1920 H.G. Wells wrote, ‘History is becoming more and more a race between education and catastrophe.’ I think he got it right. Nothing is more important to the future of the United States and the world than the breadth and effectiveness of education, especially of higher education. I say especially higher education, but not because pre- school, elementary, and secondary education are less important. Success at every level of education obviously depends on what has gone before. But for better or worse, the quality of postsecondary education and research affects the quality and effectiveness of education at every level.” In the last few years, conversations have been growing like gathering storm clouds about the ways in which our universities are failing. There is talk about the poor educational outcomes apparent in our graduates, the out-of-control tuitions and crippling student loan debt. Attention is finally being paid to the enormous salaries for presidents and sports coaches, and the migrant worker status of the low-wage majority faculty. There are now movements to control tuition, to forgive student debt, to create more powerful “assessment” tools, to offer “free” university materials online, to combat adjunct faculty exploitation. But each of these movements focuses on a narrow aspect of a much wider problem, and no amount of “fix” for these aspects individually will address the real reason that universities in America are dying. To explain my perspective here, I need to go back in time. Let’s go back to post World War II, 1950s when the GI bill, and the affordability – and sometimes free access – to universities created an upsurge of college students across the country. This surge continued through the ’60s, when universities were the very heart of intense public discourse, passionate learning, and vocal citizen involvement in the issues of the times. It was during this time, too, when colleges had a thriving professoriate, and when students were given access to a variety of subject areas, and the possibility of broad learning. The Liberal Arts stood at the center of a college education, and students were exposed to philosophy, anthropology, literature, history, sociology, world religions, foreign languages and cultures. Of course, something else happened, beginning in the late fifties into the sixties — the uprisings and growing numbers of citizens taking part in popular dissent — against the Vietnam War, against racism, against destruction of the environment in a growing corporatized culture, against misogyny, against homophobia. Where did much of that revolt incubate? Where did large numbers of well-educated, intellectual, and vocal people congregate? On college campuses. Who didn’t like the outcome of the 60s? The corporations, the war-mongers, those in our society who would keep us divided based on our race, our gender, our sexual orientation. I suspect that, given the opportunity, those groups would have liked nothing more than to shut down the universities. Destroy them outright. But a country claiming to have democratic values can’t just shut down its universities. That would reveal something about that country which would not support the image they are determined to portray – that of a country of freedom, justice, opportunity for all. So, how do you kill the universities of the country without showing your hand? As a child growing up during the Cold War, I was taught that the communist countries in the first half of the 20th Century put their scholars, intellectuals and artists into prison camps, called “re-education camps”. What I’ve come to realize as an adult is that American corporatism despises those same individuals as much as we were told communism did. But instead of doing anything so obvious as throwing them into prison, here those same people are thrown into dire poverty. The outcome is the same. Desperate poverty controls and ultimately breaks people as effectively as prison…..and some research says that it works even MORE powerfully. So: here is the recipe for killing universities, and you tell ME if what I’m describing isn’t exactly what is at the root of all the problems of our country’s system of higher education. (Because what I’m saying has more recently been applied to K-12 public education as well.) First, you defund public higher education. Anna Victoria, writing in Pluck Magazine, discusses this issue in a review of Christopher Newfield’s book, Unmaking the Public University: “In 1971, Lewis Powell (before assuming his post as a Supreme Court Justice) authored a memo, now known as the Powell Memorandum, and sent it to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The title of the memo was “Attack on the American Free Enterprise System,” and in it he called on corporate America to take an increased role in shaping politics, law, and education in the United States.” How would they do that? One, by increased lobbying and pressure on legislators to change their priorities. “Funding for public universities comes from, as the term suggests, the state and federal government. Yet starting in the early 1980s, shifting state priorities forced public universities to increasingly rely on other sources of revenue. For example, in the University of Washington school system, state funding for schools decreased as a percentage of total public education budgets from 82% in 1989 to 51% in 2011.” That’s a loss of more than 1/3 of its public funding. But why this shift in priorities? U.C. Berkeley English professor, Christopher Newfield, in his new book Unmaking the Public University posits that conservative elites have worked to de-fund higher education explicitly because of its function in creating a more empowered, democratic, and multiracial middle class. His theory is one that blames explicit cultural concern, not financial woes, for the current decreases in funding. He cites the fact that California public universities were forced to reject 300,000 applicants because of lack of funding. Newfield explains that much of the motive behind conservative advocacy for de-funding of public education is racial, pro-corporate, and anti-protest in nature. Again, from Victoria: “(The) ultimate objective, as outlined in the (Lewis Powell) memo, was to purge respectable institutions such as the media, arts, sciences, as well as college campus themselves of left-wing thoughts. At the time, college campuses were seen as “springboards for dissent,” as Newfield terms it, and were therefore viewed as publicly funded sources of opposition to the interests of the establishment. While it is impossible to know the extent to which this memo influenced the conservative political strategy over the coming decades, it is extraordinary to see how far the principles outlined in his memo have been adopted.” Under the guise of many “conflicts”, such as budget struggles, or quotas, de-funding was consistently the result. This funding argument also was used to re-shape the kind of course offerings and curriculum focus found on campuses. Victoria writes, “Attacks on humanities curriculums, political correctness, and affirmative action shifted the conversation on public universities to the right, creating a climate of skepticism around state funded schools. State budget debates became platforms for conservatives to argue why certain disciplines such as sociology, history, anthropology, minority studies, language, and gender studies should be de-funded…” on one hand, through the argument that they were not offering students the “practical” skills needed for the job market — which was a powerful way to increase emphasis on what now is seen as vocational focus rather than actual higher education, and to de-value those very courses that trained and expanded the mind, developed a more complete human being, a more actively intelligent person and involved citizen. Another argument used to attack the humanities was “…their so-called promotion of anti-establishment sentiment. Gradually, these arguments translated into real- and often deep- cuts into the budgets of state university systems,” especially in those most undesirable areas that the establishment found to run counter to their ability to control the population’s thoughts and behavior. The idea of “manufactured consent” should be talked about here – because if you remove the classes and the disciplines that are the strongest in their ability to develop higher level intellectual rigor, the result is a more easily manipulated citizenry, less capable of deep interrogation and investigation of the establishment “message”. Second, you deprofessionalize and impoverish the professors (and continue to create a surplus of underemployed and unemployed Ph.D.s) V.P. Joe Biden, a few months back, said that the reason tuitions are out of control is because of the high price of college faculty. He has NO IDEA what he is talking about. At latest count, we have 1.5 million university professors in this country, 1 million of whom are adjuncts. One million professors in America are hired on short-term contracts, most often for one semester at a time, with no job security whatsoever – which means that they have no idea how much work they will have in any given semester, and that they are often completely unemployed over summer months when work is nearly impossible to find (and many of the unemployed adjuncts do not qualify for unemployment payments). So, one million American university professors are earning, on average, $20K a year gross, with no benefits or healthcare, no unemployment insurance when they are out of work. Keep in mind, too, that many of the more recent Ph.Ds have entered this field often with the burden of six figure student loan debt on their backs. There was recently an article talking about the long-term mental and physical destruction caused when people are faced with poverty and “job insecurity” — precarious employment, or “under-employment”. The article says that, in just the few short years since our 2008 economic collapse, the medical problems of this group have increased exponentially. This has been the horrible state of insecurity that America’s college professors have experienced now for thirty years. It can destroy you — breaking down your physical and emotional health. As an example: the average yearly starting salary of a university professor at Temple University in 1975 was just under $10,000 a year, with full benefits – health, retirement, and educational benefits (their family’s could attend college for free.) And guess what? Average pay for Temple’s faculty is STILL about the same — because adjuncts now make up the majority of faculty, and earn between $8,000 to $14,000 a year (depending on how many courses they are assigned each semester – there is NO guarantee of continued employment) — but unlike the full-time professors of 1975, these adjunct jobs come with NO benefits, no health care, no retirement, no educational benefits, no offices. How many other professions report salaries that have remained at 1975 levels? This is how you break the evil, wicked, leftist academic class in America — you turn them into low-wage members of the precariat – that growing number of American workers whose employment is consistently precarious. All around the country, our undergraduates are being taught by faculty living at or near the poverty line, who have little to no say in the way classes are being taught, the number of students in a class, or how curriculum is being designed. They often have no offices in which to meet their students, no professional staff support, no professional development support. One million of our college professors are struggling to continue offering the best they can in the face of this wasteland of deteriorated professional support, while living the very worst kind of economic insecurity. Unlike those communist countries, which sometimes executed their intellectuals, here we are being killed off by lack of healthcare, by stress-related illness like heart-attacks or strokes. While we’re at it, let’s add suicide to that list of killers — and readers of this blog will remember that I have written at length about adjunct faculty suicide in the past. Step #3: You move in a managerial/administrative class who take over governance of the university. This new class takes control of much of the university’s functioning, including funding allocation, curriculum design, course offerings. If you are old enough to remember when medicine was forever changed by the appearance of the ‘HMO’ model of managed medicine, you will have an idea of what has happened to academia. If you are not old enough – let me tell you that Once Upon a Time, doctors ran hospitals, doctors made decisions on what treatment their patients needed. In the 1970s, during the infamous Nixon Administration, HMOs were an idea sold to the American public, said to help reign in medical costs. But once Nixon secured passage of the HMO Act in 1973, the organizations went quickly from operating on a non-profit organization model, focused on high quality health care for controlled costs, to being for-profit organizations, with lots of corporate money funding them – and suddenly the idea of high-quality health care was sacrificed in favor of profits – which meant taking in higher and higher premiums and offering less and less service, more denied claims, more limitations placed on doctors, who became a “managed profession”. You see the state of healthcare in this country, and how disastrous it is. Well, during this same time, there was a similar kind of development — something akin to the HMO — let’s call it an “EMO”, Educational Management Organization, began to take hold in American academia. From the 1970s until today, as the number of full-time faculty jobs continued to shrink, the number of full-time administrative jobs began to explode. As faculty was deprofessionalized and casualized, reduced to teaching as migrant contract workers, administrative jobs now offered good, solid salaries, benefits, offices, prestige and power. In 2012, administrators now outnumber faculty on every campus across the country. And just as disastrous as the HMO was to the practice of medicine in America, so is the EMO model disastrous to the practice of academia in America, and to the quality of our students’ education. Benjamin Ginsburg writes about this in great detail in his book The Fall of the Faculty. I’d like to mention here, too, that universities often defend their use of adjuncts – which are now 75% of all professors in the country — claiming that they have no choice but to hire adjuncts, as a “cost saving measure” in an increasingly defunded university. What they don’t say, and without demand of transparency will NEVER say, is that they have not saved money by hiring adjuncts — they have reduced faculty salaries, security and power. The money wasn’t saved, because it was simply re-allocated to administrative salaries, coach salaries and outrageous university president salaries. There has been a redistribution of funds away from those who actually teach, the scholars – and therefore away from the students’ education itself — and into these administrative and executive salaries, sports costs — and the expanded use of “consultants”, PR and marketing firms, law firms. We have to add here, too, that president salaries went from being, in the 1970s, around $25K to 30K, to being in the hundreds of thousands to MILLIONS of dollars – salary, delayed compensation, discretionary funds, free homes, or generous housing allowances, cars and drivers, memberships to expensive country clubs. Step Four: You move in corporate culture and corporate money To further control and dominate how the university is ‘used” -a flood of corporate money results in changing the value and mission of the university from a place where an educated citizenry is seen as a social good, where intellect and reasoning is developed and heightened for the value of the individual and for society, to a place of vocational training, focused on profit. Corporate culture hijacked the narrative – university was no longer attended for the development of your mind. It was where you went so you could get a “good job”. Anything not immediately and directly related to job preparation or hiring was denigrated and seen as worthless — philosophy, literature, art, history. Anna Victoria writes, on Corporate Culture: “Many universities have relied on private sector methods of revenue generation such as the formation of private corporations, patents, increased marketing strategies, corporate partnerships, campus rentals, and for-profit e-learning enterprises. To cut costs, public universities have employed non-state employee service contractors and have streamlined their financial operations.” So what is the problem with corporate money, you might ask? A lot. When corporate money floods the universities, corporate values replace academic values. As we said before, humanities get defunded and the business school gets tons of money. Serious issues of ethics begin to develop when corporate money begins to make donations and form partnerships with science departments – where that money buys influence regarding not only the kinds of research being done but the outcomes of that research. Corporations donate to departments, and get the use of university researchers in the bargain — AND the ability to deduct the money as donation while using the labor, controlling and owning the research. Suddenly, the university laboratory is not a place of objective research anymore. As one example, corporations who don’t like “climate change” warnings will donate money and control research at universities, which then publish refutations of global warning proofs. OR, universities labs will be corporate-controlled in cases of FDA-approval research. This is especially dangerous when pharmaceutical companies take control of university labs to test efficacy or safety and then push approval through the governmental agencies. Another example is in economics departments — and movies like “The Inside Job” have done a great job of showing how Wall Street has bought off high-profile economists from Harvard, or Yale, or Stanford, or MIT, to talk about the state of the stock market and the country’s financial stability. Papers were being presented and published that were blatantly false, by well-respected economists who were on the payroll of Goldman Sachs or Merrill Lynch. Academia should not be the whore of corporatism, but that’s what it has become. Academia once celebrated itself as an independent institution. Academia is a culture, one that offers a long-standing worldview which values on-going, rigorous intellectual, emotional, psychological, creative development of the individual citizen. It respects and values the contributions of the scholar, the intellectual, to society. It treasures the promise of each student, and strives to offer the fullest possible support to the development of that promise. It does this not only for the good of the scholar and the student, but for the social good. Like medicine, academia existed for the social good. Neither should be a purely for-profit endeavor. And yet, in both the case of the HMO and the EMO, we have been taken over by an alien for-profit culture, our sovereignty over our own profession, our own institutions, stripped from us. A corporate model, where profit depends on 1) maintaining a low-wage work force and 2) charging continually higher pricers for their “services” is what now controls our colleges . Faculty is being squeezed from one end and our students are being squeezed from the other. Step Five – Destroy the Students While claiming to offer them hope of a better life, our corporatized universities are ruining the lives of our students. This is accomplished through a two-prong tactic: you dumb down and destroy the quality of the education so that no one on campus is really learning to think, to question, to reason. Instead, they are learning to obey, to withstand “tests” and “exams”, to follow rules, to endure absurdity and abuse. Our students have been denied full-time available faculty, the ability to develop mentors and advisors, faculty-designed syllabi which changes each semester, a wide variety of courses and options. Instead, more and more universities have core curriculum which dictates a large portion of the course of study, in which the majority of classes are administrative-designed “common syllabi” courses, taught by an army of underpaid, part-time faculty in a model that more closely resembles a factory or the industrial kitchen of a fast food restaurant than an institution of higher learning. The Second Prong: You make college so insanely unaffordable that only the wealthiest students from the wealthiest of families can afford to go to the school debt free. Younger people may not know that for much of the 20th Century many universities in the U.S. were free – including the CA state system – you could establish residency in six months and go to Berkeley for free, or at very low cost. When I was an undergraduate student in the mid to late 1970s, tuition at Temple University was around $700 a year. Today, tuition is nearly $15,000 a year. Tuitions have increased, using CA as an example again, over 2000% since the 1970s. 2000%! This is the most directly dangerous situation for our students: pulling them into crippling debt that will follow them to the grave. Another dangerous aspect of what is happening can be found in the shady partnership that has formed between the lending institutions and the Financial Aid Departments of universities. This is an unholy alliance. I have had students in my classes who work for Financial Aid. They tell me that they are trained to say NOT “This is what you need to borrow,” but to say “This is what you can get,” and to always entice the student with the highest possible number. There have been plenty of kick-back scandals between colleges and lenders — and I’m sure there is plenty undiscovered shady business going on. So, tuition costs are out of control because of administrative, executive and coach salaries, and the loan numbers keep growing, risking a life of indebtedness for most of our students. Further, there is absolutely no incentive on the part of this corporatized university to care. The propaganda machine here has been powerful. Students, through the belief of their parents, their K-12 teachers, their high school counselors, are convinced by constant repetition that they HAVE to go to college to have a promising, middle class life, they are convinced that this tuition debt is “worth it” — and learn too late that it will indenture them. Let’s be clear: this is not the fault of the parents, or K-12 teachers or counselors. This is an intentional message that has been repeated year in and year out that aims to convince us all about the essential quality of a college education. So, there you have it. Within one generation, in five easy steps, not only have the scholars and intellectuals of the country been silenced and nearly wiped out, but the entire institution has been hijacked, and recreated as a machine through which future generations will ALL be impoverished, indebted and silenced. Now, low wage migrant professors teach repetitive courses they did not design to students who travel through on a kind of conveyor belt, only to be spit out, indebted and desperate into a jobless economy. The only people immediately benefitting inside this system are the administrative class – whores to the corporatized colonizers, earning money in this system in order to oversee this travesty. But the most important thing to keep in mind is this: The real winners, the only people truly benefitting from the big-picture meltdown of the American university are those people who, in the 1960s, saw those vibrant college campuses as a threat to their established power. They are the same people now working feverishly to dismantle other social structures, everything from Medicare and Social Security to the Post Office. Looking at this wreckage of American academia, we have to acknowledge: They have won. BUT these are victors who will never declare victory — because the carefully-maintained capitalist illusion of the “university education” still benefits them. Never, ever, admit that the university is dead. No, no. Quite the opposite. Instead, continue to insist that the university is the ONLY way to gain a successful, middle class life. Say that the university is mandatory for happiness in adulthood. All the while, maintain this low-wage precariate class of edu-migrants, continually mis-educate and indebt in the students to ensure their docility, pimp the institution out to corporate interests. It’s a win-win for those right wingers – they’ve crippled those in the country who would push back against them, and have so carefully and cleverly hijacked the educational institutions that they can now be turned into part of the neoliberal/neocon machinery, further benefitting the right-wing agenda. So now what? This ruination has taken about a generation. Will we be able to undo this damage? Can we force refunding of our public educational system? Can we professionalize faculty, drive out the administrative glut and corporate hijackers? Can we provide free or low-cost tuition and high-quality education to our students in a way that does NOT focus only on job training, but on high-level personal and intellectual development? I believe we can. But only if we understand this as a big picture issue, and refuse to allow those in government, or those corporate-owned media mouthpieces to divide and conquer us further. This ruinous rampage is part of the much larger attack on progressive values, on the institutions of social good. The battle isn’t only to reclaim the professoriate, to wipe out student debt, to raise educational outcomes — although each of those goals deserve to be fought for. But we will win a Pyrrhic victory at best unless we understand the nature of the larger war, and fight back in a much, much bigger way to reclaim the country’s values for the betterment of our citizens. I am eager to hear from those of you who have been involved in this battle, or are about to enter it. We have a big job ahead of us, and are facing a very powerful foe in a kind of David and Goliath battle. I’m open to hearing ideas about how to build a much, much better slingshot. Sent from my iPhone

10 years, 6 months

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