"The system does not reward hard work," said Leon Zurawicki, professor at the College of Management, began Christopher Janke's front-page story in the March 27th Mass Media. It is always disturbing, at first, to learn that one's beliefs are wrong, and Mr. Zurawicki is apparently troubled. But he's not troubled enough. The purpose of this note is to share my ideas about what's wrong, and why we--all of us who believe we are thoughtful--ought to be both passionately troubled by the real function of the university and strongly opposed to the way it operates.

      At the outset I want to make it clear that my real targets are not individual administrators or faculty members (whom I may name), but institutional structures. And I don't have any particular animosity towards UMass/Boston. In fact, as students in the Science for Humane Survival (SfHS) courses have heard from me on more than one occasion (teaching involves a lot of repetition), as bad as I think UMB is, when measured by its social destructiveness, it pales in comparison to Harvard, the preeminent educational bastion promoting and guarding real-world misery for the benefit of the dominant elites. If this is at odds with your opinion of Harvard and you wish to know why I hold that view, there are a few SfHS course handouts which I will be glad to give you copies of. Or we can talk about it some time.

      So why is Mr. Zurawicki so pissed off? Lacking the credentials of a Ph.D. in psychology, all I can do is venture a layman's guess. But, here goes! What bugs him is that many individuals, according to the report, have jacked up their pay by serving stints as administrators--Betty Diener is the one example mentioned by name in the article--and there's no way honest and hard-working teaching, i.e. non-administrative, faculty can close the gaps, even with regular merit increases. And, I'm surmising, he resents his "inferior" pay, believing that merit of service ought to be reflected in money terms. Apparently he used to believe that the administrators, with their system of so-called merit pay raises, intended to be fair, and now he sees he was mistaken.

      An aside, before I continue with more general considerations. Last December I got a letter from the current chancellor which says in part, "Dear George: I am pleased to inform you that the full merit review process has been completed, and Provost Esposito and I, acting on the recommendations of the personnel committee and your Dean, have approved a merit award of $162.15 based on your work during the 1992-93 and 1993-94 academic years." The concluding boilerplate paragraph reads, "The Provost and I extend our thanks for your many contributions, in teaching, research, service and other professional activities. The university is indebted to you for your dedicated work and fortunate to have you as a valued member of our community." It is signed "Most sincerely, Sherry H. Penney." Division of $162.15 by 52 and 1/7 shows that my gross pay was generously increased by $3.11 per week.

      My first reaction was one of anger, but then I just said to myself, "Oh, fuck it! They're not worth thinking about (meaning the apparachiks who run this educational slum)." If you want to get worked up about some injustice take one that's worth it. Like, for example, so-called Western Civilization. There's a misnomer if ever there was one. It has as one of its most fundamental values, greed, greed for wealth of all kinds, for power over other persons, for power over nature, and of course for money. The right to be greedy and grasping is being institutionalized ever more thoroughly. Evidence? Look at the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the General Agreement on Tarriffs and Trade (GATT), the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the World Trade Organization (WTO), and so on. We are witnessing a veritable rampage of transnational capitalism driven by lust for material wealth, riding roughshod over the last bits of human decency and compassion for people made to suffer as the already obscenely wealthy relentlessly press on to profit even more by despoiling the earth and squeezing ever more lifeblood from the already impoverished.

      And I'm going to get worked up about that lousy $3.11 a week? Consider the fact that people in Haiti, to take one example, are so desperate to just survive that U.S. firms can pay as little as--11cents an hour is the figure I think I recall--to women sewing clothing for sale in the U.S. I recommend The Multinational Monitor, published monthly, an excellent source of factual information. Desperate people working for the profit of transnational companies is lauded by the likes of Clinton as "free trade." Can you believe it, my $3.11 a week is comparable, is of the same order of magnitude, as the income of these terribly exploited people? The true task of the university, as of the entire educational establishment, is to help maintain the stability of American society. At UMB we have a school explicitly devoted to making capitalism work, what I term the School of Management and Manipulation.

      In order to maintain the status quo, when it is so unjust, it is necessary either to force the impoverished to accept it (the U.S. prefers that method in third-world countries), or to prevent people from realizing that the system is both horrendously unjust and is not dictated by any natural laws. For if people came to know that, they might try to change the system. They might challenge the status quo. The real role, not just of the UMB School of Management and Manipulation, but of the whole U.S. educational establishment, is to protect the status quo by preventing critical thinking about socially significant issues. Critical thinking is perhaps the biggest enemy of the profit system. We are hired to suppress such thought. Part of our task is to promote greed, to inculcate the idea that greed is good, is normal and is healthy, and that if we adhere to it we will all profit eventually. Of course we don't call it greed. We call it initiative, entrepreneurship, competitiveness, good ole' American get up and go, self-starting, pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps--all the Horatio Alger bullshit you can dream of. How do you think the merit salary system of so-called "awards" fits in to teaching greed? Hang on. It'll come.

      In Greed 102 I will explore the injustices borne by students and, among the teaching faculty, especially by the part timers. Exploitation is the name of the game. Cheap teachers is what the administrators want, and of course they'd like to abolish tenure altogether, except for themselves. If you can get graduate students to teach for a pittance, that's the best. At the reserve desk in the Healy Library (Healy, a banker in a Rockefeller-affiliated bank, was Chairman of the Board of Trustees of UMass) you can find data on salaries and compensation, part of which I obtained from the ever-so-reluctant administration. I intend, eventually, to include these considerations on my website.