You knew the California budget shortfall was going to have an impact on higher education in the state. But maybe you didn’t know that the pain will not be distributed evenly. Last weekend, John Engell, a colleague of mine from San Jose State University (and currently chair of the Department of English & Comparative Literature), examined the pain that may be visited on our university in an opinion piece he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News:
Category Archives: Politics
Medical interpreters, societal commitments, and the challenges of footing the bill.
Over at The White Coat Underground, PalMD looks at the ways in which delivering good health care to deaf patients depends on providing good interpreters — and notices the difficulty of making this happen:
How do we approach this as a society?
Item 1: Deaf people have special needs with regards to interactions with the health care system.
Item 2: The government mandates that proper interpreters be provided for doctor visits.
Item 3: Neither patients nor doctors can afford to provide this service.
Now don’t go telling me that “all you rich doctors can afford to get the interpreter”—we most emphatically cannot. That is a simple fact, and if you don’t believe me, then you don’t. Epur, si moeve.
There is not a great deal of support for an expensive government mandate that would pay for interpreters for the deaf. How do we provide this critical service?
I think the way Pal has framed this is exactly right — this is a question that is an ethical challenge to us as a society. Given the limits on what any of us can accomplish as individuals, what are we committed to doing collectively? What ought we commit to do collectively? And what does this say about what goods we regard as necessities to a good life — or about which members of society we believe are entitled to partake of this good life?
Book review: Wired for War.
Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century
by P.W. Singer
New York: Penguin
2009
For some reason, collectively humans seem to have a hard time seeing around corners to anticipate the shape our future will take. Of those of us who remember email as a newish thing, I suspect most of us had no idea how much of our waking lives would come to be consumed by it. And surely I am not the only one who attended a lab meeting in which a visiting scholar mentioned a speculative project to build something called the World Wide Web and wondered aloud whether anything would come of it.
In the realm of foreign conflicts, our shared expectations also seem to land some distance from reality, as missions that are declared “accomplished” (or all but) stretch on with no clear end in sight.
In Wired for War, Brookings Institution senior fellow P.W. SInger asks us to try to peer around some important corners to anticipate the future of robotics in our conflicts and in our lives more broadly. The consequences of not doing so, he warns, may have significant impacts on policy, law, ethics, and our understanding of ourselves and our relation to our fellow humans.
Good intentions, bad effects: the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act.
Remember the scares around December 2007 about lead in children’s toys manufactured in China? Back then, people cried out for better testing to ensure that products intended for children were actually safe for children. Partly in response to this outcry, a new law, the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, was passed. The intent of the law is to protect kids from harm from lead (and other substances) in children’s products. However, the effect of the law may be something else altogether.
I’ve been meaning to post on this for awhile, but I’ve finally been spurred into action by my friend Heddi at the Educational Resource Center of Santa Cruz. Here’s how Heddi explained the situation in an email to me:
Help jailed AIDS researchers in Iran.
You know what makes an already scary world a lot scarier? When a government decides it’s a crime for disease researchers to do their job.
From Declan Butler:
Iran has summarily tried two of the nation’s HIV researchers with communicating with an “enemy government,” in a half-day trial that started and ended on 31 December in Tehran’s Revolutionary Court. There will be no further court hearings, and a verdict is expected within days.
The brothers, Arash and Kamiar Alaei, who have achieved international acclaim for their progressive HIV-prevention programme, have been held in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison since their arrest last June (see Nature story, subscription required). Kamiar, the younger of the brothers, holds a master’s degree from the Harvard School of Public Health and was to have resumed doctoral studies at the University of Albany’s School of Public Health in New York. Arash, former head of international education and research cooperation at the Iranian National Research Institute of Tuberculosis and Lung Disease, runs a clinic in Tehran. The brothers are not thought to have been politically active. …
In August, the prosecutor publicly accused the men of fomenting a velvet revolution, arguing that they had collaborated with other scientists around the world, including some in the United States, attended international AIDS conferences, and met frequently with AIDS NGOs. “Those are not crimes, that’s good medicine,” says [Physicians for Human Rights spokesman Jonathan] Hutson, adding that it has casts a chilling effect on academic collaboration between Iran and the rest of the world. In December, the US National Academies suspended visits to Iran after the temporary detention of one of its officials in Tehran.
It’s not clear from all this whether the “crime” for which the Alaei brothers are being held is communicating scientific information with other researchers (which is part of how scientists together solve scientific puzzles like the causes and cures of diseases), or whether it is bothering to focus on HIV and its treatment in the first place.
Futile cycles.
While we’re speaking about revolutions and such, Hilzoy on the ongoing violence in Gaza:
I imagine what people on both sides are thinking is something more like: do you expect us to just sit here and take it? Do you expect us to do nothing? To which my answer is: no, I expect you to try to figure out what has some prospect of actually making things better. Killing people out of anger, frustration, and the sense that you have to do something is just wrong. For both sides.
You say you want a revolution
Dr. Isis expresses reservations about signing on for Twisty Faster’s revolution.
ScienceWoman offers a sketch of what her revolution might look like.
Me? I’m pretty exhausted from today’s outing with my offspring, what with it being Winter Break, otherwise known as 24/7 parenting. But I have a few brief ideas of what I’d like to see on the post-revolutionary landscape.
Ethics and population.
Back at the end of November, Martin wrote a post on the ethics of overpopulation, in which he offered these assertions:
- It is unethical for anyone to produce more than two children. (Adoption of orphans, on the other hand, is highly commendable.)
- It is unethical to limit the availability of contraceptives, abortion, surgical sterilisation and adoption.
- It is unethical to use public money to support infertility treatments. Let those unfortunate enough to need such treatment pay their own way or adopt. And let’s put the money into subsidising contraceptives, abortion, surgical sterilisation and adoption instead.
I understand the spirit in which these assertions are offered — the human beings sharing Earth and its resources have an interest in creating and maintaining conditions where our numbers don’t outstrip the available resources.
But, there’s something about Martin’s manifesto that doesn’t sit right with me. Here, I’m not trying to be coy; I’m actually in the process of working out my objections. So, I’m going to do some thinking out loud, in the hopes that you all will pipe up and help me figure this out.
Faculty unions: organizing when your day-job is a labor of love.
In spring of 2007, after nearly two years without a contract, the faculty of the 23 campuses of the California State University system (of which my university is a part) voted to ratify a contract. Among other things, that contract included raises to help our salaries catch up to the cost of living in California. (Notice the word “help” in that sentence; the promised raises, while making things better, don’t quite get the whole job done.)
The negotiations for this contract were frustratingly unproductive until my faculty union organized a rolling strike that was planned as a set of two-day walkouts at each of the 23 campuses in the system. For most classes, this would have meant losing one instructional day, which would minimize the impact on individual students. As well, a two-day rolling strike would make it pretty pointless for the administration to try to bring in replacement workers. Even with syllabi in hand, our courses are not easily staffed with subs on short notice. (Reasonably, someone would need my notes — some of which are pretty darned cryptic — and if I’m walking a picket line, I’m not going into my office to dig out my notes and hand them over to a scab.)
When strike dates were announced (and, we are told, with some serious political pressure behind the scenes to avert a strike that would have garnered national and international media coverage), the administration came back to the bargaining table with a contract the negotiating team deemed reasonably good (a judgment with which the faculty showed its agreement by voting to ratify the contract).
The staggering thing to me is that we went almost two years without a contract before we could bring ourselves to the point where we were ready to strike.
Now, because California is in the throes of yet another budget crisis, the Chancellor’s office is making noises about revisiting the contract currently in force and renegotiating those promised raises. (Apparently, the state might not be able to afford them, even though we seem to be able to afford raises for administrators.) So the faculty may find themselves in the position of having to fight to get what was promised in the last round of fighting.
There are certain features of a good many faculty members that seem to make it hard for us to embark easily on a job action. Because we’re back in negotiation mode a lot sooner than expected, I think it’s worth examining them.
Permanent budget crisis.
There are some newspaper stories that must be pretty easy to write at this point because it seems like they’re essentially the same year in and year out. California is having another budget crisis, and the Californians who are going to take it in the teeth are students — especially students in the California State University (CSU) system, to which the university that employs me belongs.