Life on the Edge of Implosion of Democracy

Back when I left Bell Labs, and decided to switch coasts to live with Yoon, I made a risky choice. Tenure-track jobs at universities where I would be able to teach advanced courses were few, and fewer within a comfortable commuting distance from Yoon's home. I took the job at Cal State LA with full knowledge of its moral and existential hazards. But damn it, I didn't expect the implosion of California Democracy to hit just 9 years after I took the job.

I'm posting this because the sudden silence from my end of the wire may have made some readers of this blog uncomfortable, and I don't want anyone to think that I have a problem beyond serious overwork. With a 12-unit per quarter teaching load, overwork was a given from the start. That would have been true even in classics, or in medieval history, where the content of courses in unlikely to change much from decade to decade. Teaching 12 units of advanced technical courses in Information Systems, with a 3-year technology half-life and 20% of everything in the typical course becoming obsolete each year, was always Serious Overwork. With research, and with enough hands-on experimentation with new technologies to keeps ahead of the graduate students (some of them already CIOs) in my evening classes, the better part of my waking hours were accounted for. And then, this year, came the (financial) crisis of California Democracy.

How does a busy urban school deal with a 16-million-dollar hole in its budget? First, it does not renew the contracts of part-time adjunct faculty. Simultaneously, there is a flow of incoming students whose 529s shrank enough that they can no longer afford private universities, or even the UC. The remaining faculty's advanced courses are cut, and we are assigned to teach the Business School's required Intro to IS and the like. Since there are fewer courses and fewer sections and more students, class sizes tripled, from an average of 12 to an average of 33. I spend most of my class time dealing with e-mailed questions from students; just reading and organizing and preparing to answer those questions, without which I can have no assurance that I'm doing a responsible job, takes three times as long as it used to.

Two of my three 4-unit courses this term (4 units because they cover the content of a 3-unit semester course in one academic quarter) are Intros. And there are NO adequate textbooks for Intros out there. So, following John Drake, I'm teaching my Intro sections with books that were never meant to be textbooks. I have nothing that otherwise would have come from the textbook's Instructor Site: no prepared homework assignments, no presentation PowerPoints, no test question pools (I had no idea how much time such conveniences saved.) And this on top of getting the Intro students (two-thirds of them coming from Pragmatist schools where they never had to do this before) to think in concepts instead of shopping lists.

My one remaining combined Senior-Graduate advanced technical course is up to the same numbers, because so many other courses were canceled. From 100% students who were taking a difficult technical course because they were burning with enthusiasm for its content, I'm down to 33%, the rest there because they had to take something; some of them signed up without the lower-division prerequisites. And the old textbook was 4 years old and obsolete; I switched to a brand new one for which I'm receiving the still-rough supporting materials by e-mail, sometimes in the morning before the evening's class.

The budget for graduate assistants and graders also is gone. I'm typing this as an otherwise-I-would-go-insane break from grading 100 midterm exams.

And we were just advised of an even larger hole next year. So I am lucky, in that I still have a job...