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11 am already???
Dec. 20th, 2005 11:12 amSo there's a breaking news headline at CNN.com: Federal judge rules "intelligent design" cannot be included in Pennsylvania public school biology courses. That's good, right? Though I don't know how any of these kinds of decisions will really play out.
I was surprised to read on-line this morning that the subway system has been closed down with a pretty full-on strike in NYC. I wonder what the streets feel like in NYC today -- is the mood noticeably different with more pedestrians and lines for taxis....? I'm troubled by how the news reports play up three things -- the Authority's offers (without a sense of what the current compensation packages are), the fact that strikes by public employees are illegal, and commuters' exasperation over how the pension packages are already good by today's standards (why are they complaining?). I can't believe people are so willing to give up the idea of stable retirement plans within jobs.
I also really need to stop reading the Chronicle of Higher Ed job forums because people are so mean on there. In addition to that smugness and meanness (job applicants should stop their whining about how difficult the job process is), there are many posts that normalize market forces and the oversupply of PhDs, especially in the humanities, as justification for the horrible state of job security in the field (wherein less than 50% of job seekers get full-time, non-term-limited professorial jobs). And I just want to scream at them that there is no such thing as a natural law for market forces when we're dealing with a set of discrete, though complex and intersecting, forces about which we can make substantive change -- things like having a more transparent process for job applications, having a timetable that doesn't put undue burden and expense on job applicants, rethinking the admission of students into graduate study at rates that far exceed job prospects, and so on....
Must get out of apartment and run some errands.
I was surprised to read on-line this morning that the subway system has been closed down with a pretty full-on strike in NYC. I wonder what the streets feel like in NYC today -- is the mood noticeably different with more pedestrians and lines for taxis....? I'm troubled by how the news reports play up three things -- the Authority's offers (without a sense of what the current compensation packages are), the fact that strikes by public employees are illegal, and commuters' exasperation over how the pension packages are already good by today's standards (why are they complaining?). I can't believe people are so willing to give up the idea of stable retirement plans within jobs.
I also really need to stop reading the Chronicle of Higher Ed job forums because people are so mean on there. In addition to that smugness and meanness (job applicants should stop their whining about how difficult the job process is), there are many posts that normalize market forces and the oversupply of PhDs, especially in the humanities, as justification for the horrible state of job security in the field (wherein less than 50% of job seekers get full-time, non-term-limited professorial jobs). And I just want to scream at them that there is no such thing as a natural law for market forces when we're dealing with a set of discrete, though complex and intersecting, forces about which we can make substantive change -- things like having a more transparent process for job applications, having a timetable that doesn't put undue burden and expense on job applicants, rethinking the admission of students into graduate study at rates that far exceed job prospects, and so on....
Must get out of apartment and run some errands.