One phone call....And my life will now be radically different forever...

[freshwest]

22. The threads of the trials of higher education workers was brought up to me the other day at a store.

Last edited Fri May 23, 2014, 01:25 PM - Edit history (1)

A customer was loading their vehicle outside the front doors with grocery and other purchases with the back door of their SUV open. The radio station was blaring at full volume. It was as if it was public event, I wasn't quite sure what was going on for a minute there.

It was a local call-in show, and the RW demagogue was doing the folksy Rush or Beck routine. His target that morning was our biggest state university where most of our state's brain trust issues forth to do engineering, medicine, law and research.

He claimed that the group you were in were making $100,000 a year. That they were not full professors. And that there were three hundred or more (costing $30M a year) and the callers came on the line talking about the struggles of paying tuition and housing for their kids and going into debt to be at that university. That tone in his voice as he led them to his conclusions with no opposition, just shock at dismay at this unsourced report of what they were being robbed, was utterly sickening.

It went on and on as I listened (as I said, there was no way not to hear it) while loading my own vehicle with my purchases. Not much to load, but I am in constant pain and things take time. So I got an earful.

It's part of the push since the 1980's to destroy ALL public education, from pre-school to post-graduate institutions. The CTers say higher learning places are being employed to train technocrats to harm them, that the doctors can't be trusted, etc. Libertarians don't want to pay for that 'enlightened' society they claim to be advocating. The fundamentalists say all public education is the elite's way to convert kids into gay socialist atheists.

I hope you are rewarded along with your peers with the respect and dignity your years of applying yourself to your profession deserve. We need more good educators, not more of the Idiocrats.