From higher ed. contract negotiations to painting ferry boats--arguably not that different

It's good to be home. And to be done with nearly 4 months of negotiations with the CMU administration.

That's right, it was a long haul, but the non-tenure track faculty at CMU have a four year contract. It wasn't easy, nor most of the time was it fun, but we did it. We didn't get everything we wanted (and deserved), but in this political and economic climate, we did fairly well. Now comes the implementation and enforcement of the contract. But first, starting Monday, we have to paint the Emerald Isle!

She's a big old girl, and the paint job takes a beating over the winter, so every year, five or six of us spend three or four long days painting her, from the top down (almost) to the waterline. My favorite part is using the raft to paint the green just above where the black hull paint begins. I think it is because of the whole Huck Finn thing.

Anyway, we're here, alternating between our little house (a spacious 8 feet by 12 feet) and Larissa's grandparents' place on the harbor. I have internet access in town, so that's when get to do fun stuff like blog a bit. With any luck, I should be able to post fairly regularly for most of the summer. So thanks for sticking with me if you are still there. I may have some news before long, but I can't be any more specific just yet. Until then, keep up the good fight.

Publishing News

My most recent story, "Wit's Soul" can now be read on the exciting new online art and literature review, Ad-Hominem. Incidentally, Larissa is also the featured artist on Ad-Hominem right now, and some examples of her fine photography can be found there.

In addition, "Hard Winter," which may be my favorite of the stories I've written, is now available free of charge in a PDF version of Paradigm Volume One. It is dark story set on Beaver Island, and I apologize if anyone thinks they see themselves in it - it is purely coincidental. I did use mash-ups of real island names for flavor, but it was a random process. So if your see your first or last name on a character, rest assured, the character is nothing like you--it just means I like your name. I promise. On a side note, strangely enough, in the listing for Paradigm on the Poets and Writers magazine's markets page, I am listed as one of three "representative authors" for this journal, which I guess is a good thing, though I'm not entirely sure what it means.

Furthermore, my story, "Rumble Strip" can be found in the PDF version of Word River. This one is a bit racy, and so not for the faint of heart.

Thanks for reading!

Look at All Those Zeros!!! (the numbers, not the deans)

In an article Wednesday explaining how the salaries of the five shiny new deans of the incipient medical school are already costing the university $1.37 million a year*, the Provost explained that the salaries are comparable to those of other medical schools. Isn’t it interesting how the inflation of administrative salaries is tied to what other universities are paying, and lacks any correlation to the cost of living?

Just like Wall Street, universities follow the creed that if you want the best, you have to pay as much as (or more than) the rest. Dean Yoder, at $385,000, makes about $6500 more than MSU’s dean, though I am fairly certain that the cost of living is significantly higher in East Lansing. In fact, you almost have to go to East Lansing to spend the kind of money we’re talking about. (Mt. Pleasant has some fine restaurants, but you just can’t burn through a $1000 in an evening here the way you can in more affluent areas.) I really do wonder how much of our administration’s salaries are spent locally. Ever tried to imagine President Ross and Provost Shapiro chatting while standing in line at Ric’s with full shopping carts?

What really got me to put down my grading pen and put on my social commentary hat (a fedora, by the way, with an obviously phony press pass in the band), though, was a second article which explained that Ross is not alone among university presidents in moonlighting at a for-profit company. Is it possible that—all evidence to the contrary—administrative salaries are not high enough? If Ross, who I’ve always thought of as one of those guys who doesn’t have to buy his suits at Goodwill—if he has to go out and get a second job to make ends meet, then perhaps $350,000 (plus up to $70,000 in bonuses) doesn’t go quite as far as I’ve always assumed.

Of course, the flipside is that, (gasp!) if he has so much time on his hands that he goes fishing for positions like this during his first year as president, maybe the work he is doing here isn’t, in fact, as demanding as the salary would suggest. Even though the position on the Furniture Brands International Board of Directors only involves “four annual meetings,” there must be some work involved between meetings for it to pay close to $50,000 a year.

Now, this may just sound like the bitter grumbling of someone who would count himself lucky to be making $45,000 a year, and to some extent, it is. For the last two years I have taught full time (12 credits/semester) for $24,600 a year (“temporary faculty” are one of those groups whose wage freezes helped the university cut $5.2 million from the budget this year, though no one asked us if we were willing to take one for the team). Unlike President Ross, I have no stipulation in my appointment letter that says I am entitled to a bonus of up to 20% of my salary each year if I perform up to expectations (isn’t that called doing your job?). In fact, one of the conditions of my employment is that I obtain permission from the chair of my department if I decide to take on another job while teaching at CMU. Throughout the summer I work full time at my other job (driving a forklift), which brings my total annual income to about $30,000. Now, I understand that I could have gone to school for something that would have proven more lucrative in the long run, but I made a decision not to do so, and I am happy with it.

What concerns me is the message President Ross’s moonlighting sends. The idea that you can never have too much money is anything but new, but it’s unfortunate when an institution like CMU endorses it with such gusto. It is evident in the seemingly inexorable erosion of the intrinsic “value” of education in favor of its actual financial paybacks. This rift is plainly visible in the ongoing addition to the six-year-old Health Professions Building, while in the aging homes of less glamorous programs (Anspach, Brooks, and Pearce date from the 1960s—not old enough to be historic or charming, but old enough to be obsolete) the basic infrastructure crumbles.

There appears to be no remedy to these imbalances—after all, administrators are appointed by other administrators, and University presidents are appointed by the Board of Trustees, most of whom are moonlighting from their real jobs. My fear though, is that of all the lessons students take away from their time here at CMU, the one that sticks will be that money is success, and that you can never, ever have enough.



* I would like to take the opportunity to point out the glaringly obvious fact that the two male deans make $710,000 between them, while the three female deans make a total of only $660,000—I’m sure there is a reason that has nothing to do with gender—there always is.

New Years Wishes

We made it to another one. Can you believe it? 2010?! That's like sci-fi territory! David Brin's The Postman takes place in the future still, but not for long (2015). We might have already passed Blade Runner. Anyway, this time of year, we typically find ourselves mired in regrets over things left unfinished (or those at which we outright failed), while hoping for something more and better for the coming year. I won't get into the former--neither you nor I have the time. I will, however, touch on some of my aspirations for the new year. Aside from the writing projects I hope/intend to complete (some of which are extensions on resolutions as far back as Y2K!), I have several other things in mind.

First, I want to be a better husband--less self-absorbed, more understanding, all that good stuff. I want to be the father I ought to be, but some of that is going to require me to be more disciplined with my time. I never really thought that having a job where half or more of my work can be done from home would be so difficult, but it has turned out to be so. I want to be more organized, more disciplined, more productive when I am working, and more present when I am not. I want to be a better son--hopefully we can get down to Florida this spring so my parents can see Lysander again. I want to send birthday cards to both my parents this year, and on time! Mothers' Day and Fathers' Day too, I suppose. I want to be a better friend to all those who deserve it (this might include a trip to Oshkosh). I want to be less awkward with my colleagues, and more reliable for my students. I want to read more and watch TV less. I want to blog more consistently so that it might actually be worth someone's while to check in at the Karnival now and again.

I could go on. Overall, I am trying to use my resolutions more for the general good than for specific things I want. Will it make them any more likely to be kept? Possibly: the guilt factor might be greater. Anyway, I wish you all the very best on this new years day.

A Modest Proposal Upon the Occasion of a Routine Medical Procedure Involving the Removal of a Small Piece of My Nephew

First, let me get this out of the way: My name is Patrick, and I'm a circumcised man. Whew! That was easier than I thought it would be. But there it is, the bald truth. Why, you might find yourself wondering, did I feel it necessary to share this juicy bit of information with the 1.6 readers of this blog? Because I have a new nephew, and like me, he is circumcised, although the experience is for him, I'm sure, a much more vivid memory. Until my wife and I did some research into the topic prior to our son Lysander's birth, I never really thought about my missing foreskin. After all, how can I miss something I don't even remember having? Why has it become a standard procedure to remove most of a newborn boy's foreskin within days of his birth? Why do we insist on making an already stressful couple of days excruciatingly painful as well? There must be a good reason, right?

As the story goes, Moses brought the practice of circumcision out of Egypt and introduced it to the Jewish people as a rite of passage. It was part of a contract with God: in exchange for the sacrifice of a bit of nerve-rich skin, God would ensure the fertility of the tribes of Judea. At first, the procedure was performed with blades of flint, upon willing males who had reached the age of puberty and were ready to move into adulthood. As time went by, however, the ritual began to be performed on the eighth day after birth rather than at the start of puberty. Rather than being something a young man would choose to have done, it became something a child's parents would decide for him. Obviously, when the first generation of Jewish men, who had never even seen their own foreskin, grew up, they too chose to have their baby boys circumcised--it sure beat having it lopped off just as things started to get interesting. So how do we get from that point to my nephew? After all, we don't perform animal sacrifice anymore, but we still cut foreskins down like they were dandelions. This is where things get interesting.

Alexander the Great outlawed circumcision in the area 300 years before Christ's birth. And yet by the time the early Christian Church got rolling, male converts were required to be circumcised. Paul put a stop to it before long, however, citing the idea that the New Covenant (with Jesus) superseded the older Jewish arrangement with the big guy. Baptism replaced circumcision as the initial rite of passage for the faithful, and foreskins everywhere breathed a sigh of relief (except the Jewish and Muslim ones--they were still on the chopping block).

Christian Europe was largely unfamiliar with circumcision, except as a mark of Jewish or Muslim faith, until the late 1800s when the medical establishment began to promote it as a health precaution. "Masturbatory insanity" is one of the health risks that circumcision was touted to prevent. The procedure caught on throughout the United Kingdom and many of the former British colonies in the early 1900s, though not so much on the Continent. The practice fell out of vogue in most of the former empire sometime after WWII, though it is still fairly standard in the United States. It should be noted that the ghoulish practice of female circumcision, which has received so much press of late under the title "female genital mutilation," was also popularized in the Western World in the early 1900s, also as a cure for masturbation. The question remains over why it is considered mutilation in one case and a standard procedure in another (I do realize that a clitorectomy usually involves the removal of the entire clitoris, which is considerably more drastic than your garden-variety circumcision, but in essence, they are both unnecessary surgery).

Let's take a moment here to be sure we all know exactly what we're talking about. The foreskin is a covering of loose skin over the glans of the penis. In an adult male, the foreskin rolls back to reveal the glans and forward to cover it. However, in an infant, the foreskin is not nearly as mobile--in fact, it is attached to the glans and essentially forms the outer layer of skin. By the end of late puberty, the foreskin separates from the glans and becomes retractable. This is the way it is supposed to go. In a neonatal circumcision, however, the doctor has to forcibly tear the foreskin back from the glans before it can be clamped into one of a variety of devices and cut away. Anyone cringing yet? In actuality, much of the major trauma from a circumcision may not be a result of the incision at all, but of the premature peeling of the glans. The raw wound left behind is prone to all sorts of irritation and infection in the weeks following the operation, and sometimes requires a pediatrician to repeatedly tear the remnant of the foreskin back from where it continually tries to heal onto the glans where it belongs. Whew. I'm just glad that it can only happen to a guy once!

Since the mid-twentieth century, medical science has disproved many of the claimed benefits of circumcision, though a study has indicated that circumcision may decrease the chances of HIV infection. And yet, circumcision continues. Why? Here's my guess: a father who has no foreskin of his own is unlikely to protest when his son's is removed, because (1.) it hasn't affected him, and (2.) he wouldn't know how to deal with it if his son had one. When Larissa and I started to discuss the issue, I was firmly on the pro-cutting side. I had no good reason, just some vague ideas about cleanliness and the possibility of being teased in the locker room. And yet, here I was, ready to have a piece of my son's penis sliced off within days of his introduction to this world of ours. "Welcome to the world, kid. You won't be needing that here." Snip!

The arguments for circumcision these days are pretty feeble: babies can't feel it, or at least won't remember how much it hurt; it might reduce the chances of them catching STD's fifteen years down the road; we don't want other kids to laugh at them in the shower. Anyone who has changed the diaper of a recently circumcised boy knows that they damn well can feel it, and if we're doing painful things to kids while they are young simply because we're pretty sure they won't remember them, why not open them up and get that pesky appendix out and root out those incipient wisdom teeth while we're at it? As for the STD issue, not only is the evidence scanty, but if that were our only motivation, wouldn't chopping off the whole thing work even better? And the shower thing...seriously?! We mutilate out children as a result of peer pressure?! Give me a break.

There are, it seems, only three truly valid medical reasons for circumcision, though even these come under fire when used to justify circumcision as a preventative: phimosis (a painfully tight foreskin on an infant), balanitis (inflammation of the foreskin due to irritation or infection), and a foreskin that makes sex painful for an adult man (I guess this one doesn't get a fancy name). That's it. One is a hygiene or soap allergy issue while the other two amount to a rare birth defect.

Let me take another stab at why men might decide to put their boys under the knife in this day and age: fear of the unknown, lack of empathy, and in some cases, perhaps even guilt. To some extent, we all fear what we don't know, but seriously, an uncircumcised infant or toddler is not scary, at least no more so than a circumcised one. On the other hand, some dads may think "Hey, it was good enough for me, why not for my son?" That backward rationale is the exact opposite of the hope most parents profess to have: don't we all want something better for our children? Still other parents may already have a circumcised boy and may be unwilling to say no to a repeat simply because they already put one kid through it, and they don't want to play favorites. Whatever the reason, it is almost always more about the parents' feelings than those of the helpless child whose future is being decided.

It is sad, really. My son is now almost a year-and-a-half old, and we have not had a single problem with his intact foreskin. We don't have to do anything special to keep it clean, it never causes him pain, and he never had to go through the extended and painful recovery following the operation. So my proposal is this: open your minds. We need not be stuck in the same ruts our parents and their parents were in. Think for yourself. Ask questions. Why do we do this? Why should we? You might be surprised by some of the answers you get. The worst case scenario is that your son will decide that he wants to be circumcised when he is old enough to do so, and will have it done himself, but at least then he will be the one making the choice.

Surces:
Male Health

Wikipedia

History of Circumcision