Penn Professors Double Down on Occupy Wall Street

In another demonstration of the mainstream Left’s full-throated embrace of illegality, mob mayhem and anti-Semitism, a group of Penn University professors has expressed “solidarity” with the Occupy Wall Street movement. “Occupy Wall Street is protesting a system that provides increasingly few opportunities for the majority–the 99%–while generating vast profits for a tiny minority,” the petition reads. “Along with the demonstrators, we are demanding an end to the extreme inequalities that structure our society.” One of the most extreme inequalities currently afflicting American society? The necessity of acquiring a college education in order to secure a job–and the mind-boggling cost of that education.

Why is a college education necessary? Wall Street Journal columnist James Taranto explains the evolution. “What most professional jobs require is basic intellectual aptitude. And what has changed since the 1970s is that the court has developed a body of law that prevents employers from directly screening for such aptitude.”

The most important part of that body of law was a 1971 Supreme Court case. In Griggs v. Duke Power, Willie Griggs and a dozen other black employees of Duke Power’s Dan River hydroelectric plant in Draper, North Carolina sued the company for discrimination. In 1955, Duke had instituted a high school diploma requirement for every other department except Labor, where these men were employed. In 1965, when passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 went into effect, Duke began allowing transfers of non-graduates, provided they could pass two tests: the Wonderlic Test, which rates general mental ability, and the Bennett Mechanical Comprehension Test, which was geared to predict job performance in mechanical fields. Duke based its passing scores on the national median scores for high school graduates.

Every lower court that heard the case agreed that whites fared better on the tests, thus putting blacks at a disadvantage in hiring. This violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibited the use of tests which could result in a “disparate impact.” Both a federal court and the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of Duke, noting that the test did not reveal any discriminatory intent. The Supreme Court overruled the lower courts, essentially contending that while such tests are not illegal under Title VII, discriminatory consequences, rather than intent, was the critical factor. Such tests are legal only if “they are demonstrably a reasonable measure of job performance,” wrote Chief Justice Warren Burger at the time.

Taranto notes that disparate impact does not apply to college admission requirements, such as SAT tests, and explains that businesses requiring college degrees for employment do not violate Griggs because “colleges and universities…go out of their way to discriminate in favor of minorities. By admitting blacks and Hispanics with much lower SAT scores than their white and Asian classmates, purportedly in order to promote ‘diversity,’ these institutions launder the exam of its disparity.” Thus, colleges become the business world’s “shield” against civil rights lawsuits, which is why, Taranto notes, that 65 Fortune 500 companies filed amicus briefs in Grutter v. Bollinger, the 2003 Supreme Court case that allowed for the use of race as a factor in determining admissions. Ergo, obtaining a college degree “is a very expensive way of showing that [a potential employee] has, in effect, passed an IQ test,” he writes.

Once a college degree became a “necessity,” it was inevitable that some level of upward pressure on the cost of obtaining a degree would occur. Yet the level of that increase is astounding, and nothing reflects this better than the amount of borrowing undertaken to pay for it. Last year, the amount of student loans crossed the $100 billion mark, and the total amount of outstanding loans–government-guaranteed outstanding loans–will pass $1 trillion this year. Furthermore, students are borrowing twice as much as they did ten years ago, adjusted for inflation, and the total outstanding debt has doubled in the last five years, and more than quadrupled over the last ten. Americans now owe more for student loans than they owe on their credit cards.

The borrowing goes to pay for college tuition fees, which have been on a meteoric jag, rising almost 130% over the last 20 years (6 percent faster than the annual inflation rate), even as incomes have remained largely stagnant. At some of the more elite universities in the nation, the cost of tuition, fees and room and board is staggering, between $58,000 and $54,000 per year. Yet even the average costs come in at $39,000 per year for a four year institution.

The borrowing also goes to pay for professors, who stand in solidarity with the so-called 99 percent. And as one might suspect, railing against income inequity doesn’t come cheap. According to the New York Times, which noted that academic pay between 2008 and 2009 had been “squeezed by the recession,” the average salary then was $109,843 for a full professor, $76,566 for an associate professor, $64,433 for an assistant professor, $47,592 for an instructor and $53,112 for a lecturer.

Professorial work loads? From the Bureau of Labor Statics Occupational Outlook Handbook 2010-2011:

Most postsecondary teachers have flexible schedules. They must be present for classes, usually 12 to 16 hours per week, and for faculty and committee meetings. Most establish regular office hours for student consultations, usually 3 to 6 hours per week. Otherwise, teachers are free to decide when and where they will work and how much time to devote to course preparation, grading, study, research, graduate student supervision, and other activities.

The manual makes no reference to the fact that many college professors also have summers off. Nor does it make any references to tenure, which amounts to lifetime job security in a nation where the official unemployment rate in 9.1 percent, and the unofficial U-6 unemployment rate currently stands at 16.5 percent.

And then there are college presidents. The Chronicle of Higher Education reveals that the “median total compensation for college presidents in 2009-10 was $375,442.” The median total cost of employment, which includes bonuses and deferred compensation paid out over multiple years? A whopping $440,487 per annum.

Thus it should come as no surprise that student debt is at an all-time high. Two-thirds of college students graduate with such debt, and that debt averages $24,000 per student. And despite the reality that student debt cannot be forgiven even if one files for bankruptcy, 8.8 percent of student loan borrowers who entered repayment in 2009 had defaulted by the end of 2010, up from 7 percent the previous year

Even less surprising? One of the planks of the OWS movement is student debt forgiveness. “People are underwater on their student loans, just like they’re underwater on their mortgages,” said Staten Island lawyer Robert Applebaum. “The degrees aren’t worth what people paid for them, and it’s affecting the whole economy. I can’t tell you how many people have told me they’re putting off starting families and buying cars,” he added. Applebaum created a petition entitled Forgive Student Loan Debt. It has garnered more than 600,000 signatures in six weeks.

Our intrepid Penn professors? “Only by identifying the complex interconnections between repressive economic, social, and political regimes can social and economic justice prevail in this country and around the globe,” their petition states. Undoubtedly these professors remain purposefully oblivious to the reality that one of those repressive economic interconnections is taxpayer-guaranteed college loans, which underwrite higher education’s increasingly exorbitant costs. Taxpayers who, even if they have never been near a college campus, much less attended college, would be saddled with bailing out another group of elitists in the hallowed halls of academia, should the OWS crowd hold sway.

One can only imagine how much of a sacrifice the Penn professors would be willing to make in order to help make college more affordable. A modest salary cut — for the greater good — comes immediately to mind. In conclusion, the petition calls on “all members of the Penn community to lend their support to this peaceful and potentially transformative movement.” Perhaps such professors could be persuaded to “lend their support” in the manner of a colloquialism decidedly more at home in a neighborhood bar than on a college campus: put your money where your mouth is, ladies and gentlemen.

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URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2011/10/24/penn-professors-double-down-on-occupy-wall-street/

Ironic the Liberal caste system of Academics would point out the decreasing ability to gain access into another system. Try entering their guild as a Conservative. Hypocrites.

Pray for America

Is it a secret that Ivy League professors and union leaders are all in the upper income groups.Most union leaders like the heads of the American Federation of Teachers and the NEA are MILLIONAIRES with some of the best pensions in the world. Such HYPOCRITES !

Do the “learned” professors admit to their own scamming of thousands of students of uncounted thousands of dollars in tuitions in order to obtain a worthless degree in fields that never did have any jobs in their future.
There are tens of thousands of “graduates” roaming the streets unable to get employment in their field, for the simple fact there NEVER was a job to be had.
A prospective employer asks, “What do you know?” The answer is, “Everything there is to know about nothing worthwhile”
A prospective employer then asks, “So what can you actually DO?”. The answer, tragically, “NOTHING. But I want a job.”
A professor...a person collecting a high salary, to be capped with a large pension, with absolute security in his/ her own employment, while vilifying those who make it possible.
Bernie Maddof is/was a piker in comparison.

I like that term you applied. It is very apt.

(1) That "caste system of Academics" is no longer a performance based system. It is a religious order that compels compliance to a socially destructive set of ideologies. Within the caste order one only rises by compliance with the in-group. Nothing at all to do with performance, with ideas, with ideals, with science, with true scholarship. "Scholarship" has come to mean, pervertedly, only abject compliance with the religion.

(2) That "caste system of Academics" has now been forced down upon every profession and nearly every area of enterprise in America and the West.

One mechanism for that cram-down and gang-rape like takeover is as WSJ columnist James Taranto described -- the courts have come to outlaw skills testing in big corporations! This only applies to big enterprises as only in those can one litigate to "statisical samples".

The other big mechanism is the indoctrination into that system of the young graduates. Once a large enough cohort is so trained and establishes in the private sector, that ethos becomes self-sustaining.

Why aren’t the OWS kids camping out on the lawns of the hallowed halls of Harvard, et. al? Why is the fact that they have amassed $120,000 in student loans for a degree that is worthless, Wall Street’s problem? Maybe if they had a degree in engineering from a state school rather than a degree in women’s studies from Wellesley, someone would hire them.

“The necessity of acquiring a college education in order to secure a job”

Political science, Women's studies, and GAY STUDIES majors wondering why they can't find a job?
WHO KNEW!!!

“–and the mind-boggling cost of that education.”

Because professional idiots like these profs work for colleges with NO FISCAL RESPONSIBILTY, whatsoever...

“Is it a secret that Ivy League professors and union leaders are all in the upper income groups.Most union leaders like the heads of the American Federation of Teachers and the NEA are MILLIONAIRES with some of the best pensions in the world. Such HYPOCRITES !”

So, then all those young OWS student-marchers are just the debt slaves of the education industry Roosevelt/ Baby-Boom generation. Those old grasping geezers!

“Why aren’t the OWS kids camping out on the lawns of the hallowed halls of Harvard, et. al? Why is the fact that they have amassed $120,000 in student loans for a degree that is worthless, Wall Street’s problem?”

Because they were so dumb as to be drawn into an undischargeable debt by these educationists, it stands to reason they are also too dumb to recognize who drew them in and benefitted from their previous dumb decision.

The debt is effectively dischargable. For government employees, the debt is forgiven after 10 years if minimum payments are made. For private sector workers, the debt is forgiven after 20 years if minimum payments are made. With income contingent repayment, students are only required to pay 15% of discretionary income (Obama has lowered it to 10%). A student with $10,000 of discretionary income each year will only pa $1,000 per year so that the government employee discharges the debt paying only $10,000, not enough to even cover interest payments on most student debt.

Doubtless most of the professors who signed this are in “useless” fields, but I wouldn’t be too down on Penn: it’s the home to a very good College of Engineering, to the Wharton School, to a very good medical school (whose hospital system runs one of the major HMOs in the Delaware Valley), and to a major biomedical research facility, the Wistar Institute.

And, it put its endowment where its “social justice” urges are, first redeveloping a huge swath of West Philadelphia (and Penn’s campus police are real police and supplement the Philly cops in a big area around the campus), then making a point of hiring people who grew up in West Philadelphia for service jobs, creating a program to encourage them continue living in the neighborhood by subsidizing purchases of redeveloped homes (I know this from talking to the computer tech in the math dept. last time I was back visiting), and establishing a program to give a free ride (paid out of its endowment) to any kids from poor families in West Philly that meet the admissions criterion. (Part of the reason that it can still afford to do that is the fact that so much of its endowment was not in the market, but invested in West Philadelphia redevelopment, which turned out to be a much better investment even on purely financial grounds.)

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