Public "servants"

My father (and this guy's father, too) was among the many from his generation of public sector employees who missed out on pensions--they were not offered those benefits back then.  Thus, there were a few years when my brother and I regularly sent our parents money in order to help with the cash flow after father's retirement.  True to my parents' honest life, they have maintained a detailed accounting of the total remittances from their sons!

A couple of years ago, when my father came to know that my faculty salary is nowhere near the stratospheric earnings of the young and the old in the IT industry where every other Indian-American is, he insisted that they return my remittances, now that my parents do not have the cash crunch, but I managed to convince him that I am not in any financial hole.

The logic behind public sector pensions was simple: To reward those opting for public service, where the compensation is far less than what comparably talented people could earn in the private sector. For instance, when I was new to the country, a friend took me along when he visited with a cousin of his, who was a worker in an automobile assembly plant in California.  I would never have guessed that the palatial home with shiny cars in the driveway belonged to an auto factory worker who did not have a college degree.  Such were the economic possibilities even a couple of decades ago.

The global economic geography has changed.  And has changed fast.  The well-paying middle class jobs are rapidly vanishing from the American scene.  Well, vanishing from the private sector, that is.  Meanwhile, the public sector unions became stronger and stronger, and successfully increased the compensation levels.  So much so that public sector pensions have now become a nightmare for governments that have to balance their books.

As with many aspects of life, California is a leader in this as well, with its California Public Employees Retirement System, or CalPERS:

The pension fund is more than $139 billion in the red and just reported another awful year of investment returns. The East Bay Times reported last week that CalPERS' retirement debt "averages out to $11,000 for every California household which is relevant because taxpayers, not government workers, must make up the shortfall."

That update from Reason--a libertarian outfit, which has been a part of my daily news feed for years now--notes that "Most state pension funds are deep in debt, but CalPERS is among the worst in the nation."

Public sector pension in Oregon was a big story in our local paper too:

Anemic investment returns in recent years have also contributed to the troubles for the system, which now has an unfunded liability of more than $20 billion. When investment returns don’t meet the system’s assumed 7.5 percent annual rate of return, public employers must make up the difference in their budgets. The need to feed ever-greater amounts into PERS is one factor that forces many local Oregon public agencies to trim services or seek tax increases.

Now, I don't want you to think that we faculty are draining the state coffers:

 Dr. Johnny Delashaw, a former neurosurgeon at Portland’s Oregon Health & Science University, has supplanted former University of Oregon football coach Mike Bellotti as the state’s top public pension recipient.
Delashaw receives an annual benefit of $663,354 a year — $55,279.53 a month — from the Oregon Public Employee Retirement System, the agency’s latest data show. That’s 24 percent higher than Bellotti’s annual benefit of $536,995.
Bellotti had been Oregon’s top PERS beneficiary since the retirement agency first started releasing data in late 2011

Yep, a football coach used to be most highly paid retiree!  Says a lot about what people really, really, want, right?

Meanwhile, back in India, the unions learnt their lessons from the unions here, but the government did not learn from the experiences here--public sector pension schemes have skyrocketed in India.  My father, too, has a tough time understanding how such things are possible.

Full disclosures: In California and in Oregon, my jobs included pension schemes.  But, it was never the money that drew me to the teaching profession in the first place; if money were important to me, I would never have quit engineering! And, oh, I have never been a member of a union.

A minority of one

"What is your hobby?" asked a student.

For all the autoethnography that I engage in here in this blog, in my newspaper op-eds, and even in conference talks, when students ask me questions about me or my views, I don't open up.

"I like cooking" I told the student who asked about my hobby.  Thankfully, she didn't ask me about my views on cooking and eating animals ;)

In another class too it happened. I had barely walked in to the room when a student shot a question at me: "How come unlike other professors you are not wearing a union tshirt, Dr. Khé?"

I typically do not respond to such questions in the classroom.  It is not because I do not talk about my what I do when not "working" or what I think about the faculty union.  There are plenty of blog-posts on all those and more.  Yet, I try my best to deflect those questions away for one simple reason--we get together in a classroom for a specific reason, which is to learn about the scheduled topic.  To talk about the union or my hobby is nothing but an abuse of the power and privilege that I have in that classroom just because I am the instructor.

"I don't want to take up class time on that" I replied.  "I am old-fashioned that way" I added.

"No, you are not old-fashioned" came a quick retort.  "Other professors have been talking about it in class" jumped in another.

It looked like I had to satisfy the mob ;)  The clock said it was not class time yet--two minutes before the official start time.  I dragged myself to responding to why I wasn't wearing a union tshirt.  But, that opened up more questions.  "Are you against unions?" "Are you the only professor not a union member?" "Do you benefit from not being in the union?" "Are you worried about groupthink?" Important questions that students and taxpayers need to think about, and juicy topics for me.  But, I am old-fashioned!  Perhaps my responses were all way briefer than what they wanted to hear.  But, as the clock indicated it was class time, I began the process of putting them to sleep via my lecturing ;)

I worry that I will become one of the many who do not think twice about using and abusing their power and position.  Right from when I was young, I have found it difficult to work with people with power and authority because almost always they abuse it.  Whether it is the police or the politicians or the World Bank or the union or the religions or  even a lowly Ramamritham, rare is the person who does not abuse the power and the privilege that come with that position.

Over the years, and especially from my own personal experiences, I have also come to understand that it takes a lot of effort to resist the urge.  If a union leader can abuse the position's power and privilege, and if a lowly Ramamritham can, then should we be surprised when a Bill Clinton takes advantage of an intern, or ...?

Thus, I continue to tilt at real and imaginary windmills.  As George Orwell put it so well in 1984:

He wondered, as he had many times wondered before, whether he himself was a lunatic. Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one.

It looks like within my small professional world I will forever be a lunatic, and in a minority of one.  That's ok too.

I think I am an intellectual. Yet, I don't ask for more money?

If it is February, well, it means that I am done with taxes.  Yes, I am!  It also means that discussions begin, in the loudest possible tones, on how to use those tax monies.

Which is why it was no surprise to read an email earlier today, from the "comrades," that it is time to lobby the legislators.

Your salary, your benefits, your retirement, your class size, and your teaching load are all at stake.

Why do they keep providing me with fodder for my blog, when my plate is already overflowing with the topics I want to understand and write about?  At this rate, I will never get to string theory! ;)

That sentence in the email is debatable at so many levels.  If the true goal is to educate students, then do have conclusive evidence that a class size of, say, ten, is better than a class size of forty?  How about fifty?  What is the appropriate salary for a faculty?  How do we measure faculty productivity in teaching in order to relate it to the compensation?  What is an appropriate teaching load?  Why not more?  Why not less?  All these are merely about that one sentence, and the email had a lot more.

Of course, I didn't reply to that email.  Why should I when I have experienced over the years the "disdain" the "comrades" have for my ideas and opinions!

The claim that we intellectuals deserve to be paid more always reminds of me a classic essay that I read a long time ago.  I bet the "comrades" will go further berserk when I quote, ready for this?, Robert Nozick.  In a wonderful essay, polemical no doubt, Nozick wrote there:

Intellectuals now expect to be the most highly valued people in a society, those with the most prestige and power, those with the greatest rewards. Intellectuals feel entitled to this. But, by and large, a capitalist society does not honor its intellectuals.

Faculty, how much ever pretentious they might be as intellectuals, feel entitled to high earnings, and power, and prestige.

Why then do contemporary intellectuals feel entitled to the highest rewards their society has to offer and resentful when they do not receive this? Intellectuals feel they are the most valuable people, the ones with the highest merit, and that society should reward people in accordance with their value and merit. But a capitalist society does not satisfy the principle of distribution “to each according to his merit or value.”

Imagine me telling this to the "comrades."  I won't be alive to blog after, and you will miss my posts ;)

Ironically, a couple of weeks ago, during a class discussion when students remarked about happiness and incomes, I reminded them that high incomes don't guarantee higher levels of happiness.  I told them that if the empirical studies are correct, then I am now earning pretty much the income when happiness apparently peaks.  "No wonder I am always kidding around and sharing horrible groaners" I told them.

Anyway, I went about my business.  I closed the door at the noon hour and had my favorite lunch from home.  You know, the whole grilled ciabatta routine.  Today, I even included thinly sliced red onions.  Boy was it yummy!  The honeycrisp apple was even yummier.

I opened the door to go brush my teeth.  And there it was in the box right outside my office door:

You think I really care for more salary and benefits at this point?  And, if that was my goal in life, you think I would have ditched electrical engineering?

I am one richly paid educator.  Thank you!

A note here, a chocolate bar there, and I am all set.  This term is already a success.

Even Democrats are taking on teachers and their unions? Good for them!

Reading this in the Economist reminded me of the election-time strike in Chicago by members of the teachers union there and had lost track of whatever happened after the strike; now, I know at least this much:

Some of the toughest decisions Mr Emanuel had to make in his first term concerned schools. He demanded merit pay for teachers and a longer school day (Chicago’s was only 5 hours 45 minutes) and earmarked for closure 50 half-empty schools in poor districts. Teachers went on strike for the first time in 25 years, but Mr Emanuel got the longer day and the closures went ahead in 2013. The teachers kept their seniority-based pay system.
Mr Emanuel ploughed some of the money saved by closures into charter schools, which made him even more unpopular with the teachers’ unions. But charter schools have worked well in Chicago.

 Emanuel was, if you recall, the aggressive White House Chief of Staff in the first couple of years of Obama's presidency.  Chicago pols are some tough people, I suppose.

But taking on that safe Democratic votes of teachers and unions?

It turns out that Emanuel is not the lone Democrat on this issue.  Consider the following that was directed at "a teacher union member who said he represents the students":

“You represent the teachers. Teacher salaries, teacher pensions, teacher tenure, teacher vacation rights. I respect that. But don’t say you represent the students.”

Ouch!  And that was not from Wisconsin's Scott Walker, but from, get this, Andrew Cuomo!  Yep, from that blue state of New York.   The son of Mario Cuomo.

And, he said more:

Cuomo referred to the teacher unions and the entrenched education establishment as an “industry” that is more interested in protecting the rights of its members than improving the system for the kids it is supposed to be serving.
“Somewhere along the way, I believe we flipped the purpose of this,” Cuomo said. “This was never a teacher employment program and this was never an industry to hire superintendents and teachers.
“This was a program to educate kids.” ...

Ouch!

You think that maybe, perhaps, even the Democrats are beginning to wonder if the teachers' unions have drifted far from their mission?  Even if you had doubts, all you had to do was read the opening lines in a powerful essay in the New Yorker a few years ago, in 2009:

In a windowless room in a shabby office building at Seventh Avenue and Twenty-eighth Street, in Manhattan, a poster is taped to a wall, whose message could easily be the mission statement for a day-care center: “Children are fragile. Handle with care.” It’s a June morning, and there are fifteen people in the room, four of them fast asleep, their heads lying on a card table. Three are playing a board game. Most of the others stand around chatting. Two are arguing over one of the folding chairs. But there are no children here. The inhabitants are all New York City schoolteachers who have been sent to what is officially called a Temporary Reassignment Center but which everyone calls the Rubber Room.
These fifteen teachers, along with about six hundred others, in six larger Rubber Rooms in the city’s five boroughs, have been accused of misconduct, such as hitting or molesting a student, or, in some cases, of incompetence, in a system that rarely calls anyone incompetent. The teachers have been in the Rubber Room for an average of about three years, doing the same thing every day—which is pretty much nothing at all. Watched over by two private security guards and two city Department of Education supervisors, they punch a time clock for the same hours that they would have kept at school—typically, eight-fifteen to three-fifteen. Like all teachers, they have the summer off. The city’s contract with their union, the United Federation of Teachers, requires that charges against them be heard by an arbitrator, and until the charges are resolved—the process is often endless—they will continue to draw their salaries and accrue pensions and other benefits.
“You can never appreciate how irrational the system is until you’ve lived with it,” says Joel Klein, the city’s schools chancellor, who was appointed by Mayor Michael Bloomberg seven years ago.

Yep, that was the Rubber Room!

That same essay noted:

Leading Democrats often talk about the need to reform public education, but they almost never openly criticize the teachers’ unions, which are perhaps the Party’s most powerful support group.

And now it is happening. In Chicago. In the state of New York. And more.

As Reason observes:

The fact that this fiery anti-union tirade passed the lips of a blue state Democrat tells you everything you need to know about just how thoroughly teaches union have alienated many of their natural political allies. And this isn't merely some quirk of New York politics, as the same thing has happened on a local scale in numerous cities such as Chicago, Detroit, and Los Angeles. Democratic politicians everywhere are more willing to take on teachers unions than ever before.

I bet this will be some interesting political theatre. Get ready.

I find out that I am ... "bourgeois trash"

The academic world is a strange place.

Yes, that was an understatement.  But, I am trying to be polite here ;)

A couple of days ago, I was in my office, reading and writing as I always end up doing.  After all, in my life as an exile, it is not as if busloads of students and faculty come to chat with me, right?

I heard two colleagues conversing in the hallway, and quite loudly too.  From their voices, I knew who they were and didn't even have to peek out.

The louder of the two was complaining about some faculty colleague, who is not a member of the union.  Apparently this non-member had raised some questions regarding the use of "fair share" money for political activities.   I knew it couldn't be me--it has been years since I commented on anything, after I was told to "please shut up."

Anyway, this was when the louder voice got even louder: "that bourgeois trash has no idea how we do things" he yelled.

Such name calling does not surprise me anymore.  In the academic world, it has practically become the standard operating procedure not to debate ideas but to instead engage in ad hominem attacks.

And then the louder voice remarked to the other person: "you have one close to home too."  The other voice now mumbled something and the two immediately lowered their decibels.

Guess who was being referred to as the one close to home?  Yep, moi.

Which means, I am also "bourgeois trash."

Why academics shy away from intellectual debates baffles me to no end.  After all these years I should not be surprised, yes.  But, I cannot help it but be surprised at the virulent anti-intellectual atmosphere at a place that the rest of the world would think it is all about intellectual discussions!

I was thinking about this and walking towards the campus health center to get my flu shot.  I suppose I was so deep in my thoughts that I didn't even hear a colleague calling for my attention.  The driver of the car honked to get my attention.

"You are not supposed to walk in front of oncoming cars" she joked.

In the conversation that followed, she lamented about the anti-intellectual college environment.  "It is like what my friend says--the church is the best place these days to hide from god."

This atheist is now convinced that god is also my kind of people: "bourgeois trash" ;)

The capitalist behavior of unions :)

Outsourced entirely to Megan McArdle:

So bigger fleas have little fleas

Upon their backs to bite 'em

And little fleas have lesser fleas

And so, ad infinitum

A fascinating study in modern industrial organization:

If you want a good measure of how deeply the collective bargaining bill in Wisconsin has disrupted public sector unions, there is no better example than the Wisconsins Education Association Council (WEAC).

Last month WEAC announced that it was laying off 40% of its staff. With little over which to collectively bargain, and with dues no longer withheld from paychecks, the need for and sustainability of a union bureaucracy could not be justified.

Now WEAC is being boycotted by National Staff Organization (NSO), a union representing educational union employees.

It's like the fellow I once met who was a consultant, helping other people to set up consultancies.  Or the bankers who specialize in holding money for other bankers.  We're a specialist society.

The union stuff reminds me of the wonderful satire by Aasif Mandvi :)

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Shut up and sign the fucking form!

A couple of years ago, dad was surprised when I briefly mentioned to him that I had to deal with a lot of crap at work because I was not a member of the union.  (For the record, I have never been a member of any union.)

He didn't seem to worry that much that my professional life was being screwed because of this refusal on my part to carry the card and embrace the "comrades."  But then I had spared him the gory details anyway.

Dad's only response was "college professors have unions in America?"

I laughed, and left it at that.

It wasn't until my third year, by when I had already been tenured (thankfully,) that the union's membership VP walked into my office with a bunch of papers.

"Sriram, we didn't realize you hadn't signed up" he said in his usual loud voice.  "I have the form here for you."

I thanked him and refused.

He said that all the rest of the Division faculty were members.

I acknowledged that information.  But, was firm and made it clear that I didn't want to join the union.

I suppose that was the day all hell broke loose, and life has not been the same since then!

So, why write about that seven years later?

I was flicking through the channels on the telly, and watched a few minutes of John Candy and Eugene Levy in "Armed and Dangerous."  The scene I watched was hilarious.  You will see why that scene, which I have embedded here, reminded me of this incident from seven years ago!  "Shut up" indeed!

Working stiffed: the union adopts Wal-Mart's practices :)

The Daily Show points out yet another inconvenient and uncomfortable truth:

The UFCW of Nevada pays temporary workers minimum wage to demand fair treatment and wages from Wal-Mart.

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(Under)Statement of the day: on higher education

Higher education has become a colossus—a $420-billion industry—immune from scrutiny and in need of reform.

The authors go on to list a few proposals that they argue could begin the process of setting things right.  I support most of them, and have also consistently blogged about most of them.

There is a comical twist to this, though.  The same article lists a few colleges and universities that are, according to the authors, doing a good job.  The institution where I teach is included there.

One might think that such a positive note about the teaching and learning would be welcomed by faculty, right?  With a huge note of thanks to the authors? 

Hmmm .... think again!  Strange things happen in academe! Here are excerpts from all-campus emails that were in response to the publicity given to the article:

From Professor 1:

it mis-represented our campus:
"There are no star professors, little research, and the administrative pool is bare bones. All energy is focused on one thing: educating undergraduates."

This is actually a fully functioning university that includes many graduate programs, and many faculty who do excellent research. We mentor and guide graduate students, as well as undergraduates, and our programs are geared toward encouraging students to value research as a vital component of ongoing education. Moreover, it might be noted that one reason for the excellence of faculty and programs at this University is the collective bargaining agreement, which has rationalized the process of tenure and promotion, providing assurance to newly hired faculty that their career trajectory here will be rewarding and largely protected from the stress-inducing caprice of higher-level administrators that is more typical at other universities. This is a unionized faculty. And we do damn good work--research and teaching.

From Professor 2

I suspect the authors cherry picked items from PR statements and included them in the story.  We at WOU need to determine who in our administration is responsible for distributing official information about faculty workloads whereby outside observers can conclude that faculty here do "little research."  The person or persons responsible need to change their information and apologize to faculty.

From Professor 3:

Both authors visited campus about two years ago and conducted interviews.  I don't know the breadth of their research but I can tell you that I had dinner with them and agreed to be on the record for an interview of about two hours.  Claudia is a well known science reporter for the NY Times and she took extensive notes.  My point here is that the information about WOU was not simply a product of the WOU public relations office.  We will have to read the entire manuscript to see what else they have to say about our campus.

From the provost:

The Chronicle story about WOU’s appearance in the forthcoming book, Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids—and What We Can Do About It, came as a surprise to me.  The authors did not contact my office about any information used to compile the book and we had no advance notice about the Chronicle reference. ...It’s worth noting that the Chronicle piece is symptomatic of a suspicious portion of the population that has been suffering the longest and deepest recession in the country’s history and that no longer believes in government programs or the provisions that government purports to make “for the common good.”  It is likewise representative of a good portion of our citizens who question the value of a college degree as tuition continues to rise and the economy and job growth remain stagnant....

From the Director Academic Affairs/Assistant to Provost (Comment #59; I assume this was triggered by the faculty reactions to her congratulatory email)

As pleased as I am that our institution, Western Oregon University, is cited by the author as one among many who "get it right", and I must confess I do believe that our undergraduate education experience is exemplary, I would like to interject a couple of important points: First, that Western Oregon University's faculty consists of some very fine professors who are committed to teaching undergraduates but who also are fine researchers published in peer-reviewed journals and contribute significant hours of service locally, nationally and internationally. Our faculty and staff are committed to student success and they been recognized for outstanding academic advising by NACADA for the past three years.

More update ... from the minutes of the Division meeting on Sep 22nd:

HIGHER EDUCATION? – Dean Braa and Peter Callero were quoted in a new book out about higher education.  Peter apologized about the controversial book.  He said that the authors interviewed several faculty members here at Western Oregon University.  The authors and faculty disagreed with some areas of the book.  The authors defended labor unions and supported adjunct professors.  They also discussed the corporization of campuses.  Peter mentioned that they spent the afternoon with the authors and had dinner with them.  Western Oregon University’s students won the authors over.  They left “loving” the campus and faculty of Western Oregon University.  Dean Braa stated that he stressed that Western Oregon University is a teaching institution, but the faculty do good research as well.  The authors came because they love to teach.

OMG chart of the day on unemployment

The unemployed continue to be jobless for weeks and weeks on, as a contrast to past recessions. (ht)

At some point, this alone could break the economy, right?  I mean, a rational explanation for why this is not a bad omen is ....???

One possibility is that this high rate of unemployment will become the new normal for the US economy.  In other words, something that Western European economies have known for the longest time.
But, there is one major difference between us and them: we do not have the kind of safety net that Western European governments provide their peoples.

Surveying the economic scene, Paul Krugman writes:

this past Monday Jon Kyl of Arizona, the second-ranking Republican in the Senate, was asked the obvious question: if deficits are so worrisome, what about the budgetary cost of extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, which the Obama administration wants to let expire but Republicans want to make permanent? What should replace $650 billion or more in lost revenue over the next decade?

His answer was breathtaking: “You do need to offset the cost of increased spending. And that’s what Republicans object to. But you should never have to offset the cost of a deliberate decision to reduce tax rates on Americans.” So $30 billion in aid to the unemployed is unaffordable, but 20 times that much in tax cuts for the rich doesn’t count.

In such economic times, the fact that I have a job is more than enough reason to celebrate, even though it is at a place where I have been excommunicated by those faithful to the union leadership and unionism.  I feel terrible for those millions who are looking for something productive to do.  And even more for those who have given up.

Stat of the day

The two national teachers’ unions — the American Federation of Teachers and the larger National Education Association — together have more than 4.6 million members. That is roughly a quarter of all the union members in the country.

This is in a lengthy piece by Steven Brill on education reforms and The Teachers’ Unions’ Last Stand. ht

Of course, Brill is following up on his earlier piece on the battle over NY's worst teachers, which he discussed in the New Yorker essay on the Rubber Room. Of all places, it was in Tanzania that I discussed the Rubber Room essay--at a serendipitous Christmas Supper at the home of an American expat couple.  Despite all of us being liberals, we were all unanimous in our shock/unpleasantness over:

The Rubber Rooms house only a fraction of the 1.8 per cent who have been rated unsatisfactory. The rest still teach. There are fifty Rubber Roomers—a twentieth of one per cent of all New York City teachers*—awaiting removal proceedings because of alleged incompetence, as opposed to those who have been accused of misconduct.
“If you just focus on the people in the Rubber Rooms, you miss the real point, which is that, by making it so hard to get even the obvious freaks and crazies that are there off the payroll, you insure that the teachers who are simply incompetent or mediocre are never incented to improve and are never removable,” Anthony Lombardi says. In a system with eighty-nine thousand teachers, the untouchable six hundred Rubber Roomers and eleven hundred teachers on the reserve list are only emblematic of the larger challenge of evaluating, retraining, and, if necessary, weeding out the poor performers among the other 87,300.

The American Dream ... is slipping away?

In his guest viewpoint, James Newton raises a number of debatable arguments regarding incomes in the private and public sectors, and in the teaching profession. 

To a large extent, the issues that Newton raises are a reflection of the rapidly changing economic structure, here in the United States and elsewhere.  Until perhaps the final two decades of the 20^th century, the American economic structure provided enough and more opportunities for the semi-skilled and the unskilled, also, to earn decent incomes, and this resulted in the much cherished “middle class.” 

However, as economic opportunities opened up initially to tens of millions in South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore, and later on to hundreds of millions in China, India, and elsewhere, we have simultaneously witnessed a rapid decrease in the ability of semi-skilled and unskilled Americans to realize that middle class dream. 

It is no coincidence that the heyday of the American middle class correlated with a vast majority of humans on Earth living in horrible economic conditions.  It is not that the American society systematically kept the millions in Asia poor—it simply was the effects of the closed and tightly controlled economic structure and policies in most of the less developed countries that had gained independence from their colonial masters after the end of World War II. 

The world is now far less poorer because of phenomenal improvements elsewhere, which have also been triggered by countries opening up their societies to the outside world.  But, this also means that the American middle class is now under severe economic stress.  This is one of the side effects of hundreds of millions of Asians, and hopefully Africans too in the near future, rising above poverty. 

As a recent article in the Economist magazine notes, the result here in the US has been the loss of “manufacturing and number-crunching jobs that used to pay handsomely."  The article adds that the fading union power has been the effect of such occupational shifts. 

Newton argues that unionization in the public sector has been able to effectively counter this and, therefore, he contends that the public sector looks overpaid only because the “working class” in the private sector is underpaid.  But, unionization in the private sector will not prevent the occupational shifts that are bound to increase as economic growth and development further diffuse across the geographies of Asia and Africa.  Of course, the occupational shifts can be prevented by partially closing our economy from competition.  While such a strategy might deliver short-term results, it will cause long-term damages.

Finally, about the teaching profession itself, on which Newton builds his arguments.  Rare is the day that I do not think about the earnings that I have “lost” by giving up my education and training in electrical engineering, to be a professor in a highly resource-starved university system in a state where budget deficits seem to be permanent. 

But, in the history of humans, teaching has never been as lucrative a profession as it currently is.  While the teaching profession has always been highly respected practically anywhere on the planet, those positive sentiments did not always translate to comfortable lifestyles for teachers.  The economic fortunes of teachers—“gurus”—in the old India, for instance, depended on favors from kings and wealthy merchants.  And, it is doubtful whether teachers of yore could have freely expressed their opinions, particularly outside their “classroom,” without a fear of having their heads chopped off. 

Perhaps Newton might argue that this was all a result of unionization of teachers.  But, this is merely a result of the liberal democratic societies in which a good proportion of humans live.  After all, even now, how many Chinese or Saudi Arabian faculty members can freely write op-eds critiquing their government or leaders without worrying about getting thrown in jail, or worse?

At the end of it all, as concerned citizens, we have a responsibility to worry about the increasingly uncertain economic futures that lie ahead for the younger generations who also dream about leading successful American middle class lives.  We ought to worry that our elected leaders do not seem to care that unemployment continues to be high.  But, unionization in the private sector is not sufficient to ensure a continuation of the idea of the American Dream.

More pay and less security for teachers. Go for it.

I suspect that the generational dynamics that Paul Tough refers to in the K-12 system might apply to higher education too. Tough blogs that:
One striking phenomenon revealed by the Denver negotiations was a generational split among teachers. Younger teachers were generally in favor the deal being offered, and older teachers tended to oppose it. (Some veteran teachers told the Denver Post that they felt "dissed.")
A similar generational divide has appeared in D.C., where, as the Washington Post reported last month ...

The split in the teaching corps largely, but not exclusively, is occurring
along generational lines, with younger teachers more willing to accept the risks
and older ones often questioning the proposal.

The Post story mentioned an anonymous young teacher-blogger, "D.C. Teacher Chic," who is a fan of Chancellor Rhee and is decidedly in favor of her new deal (under which teachers could choose a "green plan" that would trade tenure for a higher salary or a more traditional "red plan"). Her blog—often funny, usually outraged—offers a great insight into the mind of a teacher on the young side of this growing generational divide.
At the beginning of August, when it seemed that George Parker, the president of the D.C. teachers union local, was going to turn down Rhee's offer, D.C. Teacher Chic blew a gasket:

I am going to cry. Seriously. And then I am going to start looking for another
school system.I cannot believe George Parker is supporting scraping this entire
contract and going for a more "traditional agreement." Clearly, not only does he
not represent me, but he is also taking money right out of my pocket!I
understand that shitty teachers who have been working in the system since 1952
don't want to give up tenure. Fine. I get it. So choose the red plan! I don't
understand opposing the entire proposal, unless you just haven't read it.