How much is a teacher "worth"? In Greed 102 I showed, hopefully convincingly if you accept my word that K's teaching was very good, that a teacher's "worth" to students may be far more than to the administration. K's "worth" to the administration is determined by the forces of the market. If there are many people like K seeking to teach, then it is, for the administrators, a buyers' market, and they don't have to pay much to K. The market does not weigh harm done to individuals by employers striving to lower costs. My capitalist-oriented colleagues in (what I prefer to call) the B. F. Skinner [1. B.F. Skinner, Harvard psychologist, highly-touted ideologue of behaviorism, authored Walden Two, deceased.] school of management and manipulation generally sing the virtues of the market in arriving at objective evaluations, except when they think they're not getting fair treatment.[2. Greed 001 reports unfairness claimed by Leon Zurawicki, professor of marketing and management, whose annual pay is $72,473.44.]

      I showed in Greed 102, by comparing the annual rate of pay of K, a part-timer, to that of B, a full-time tenured faculty member who teaches in the same department, that the administration "saved" $96.57 for each student-credit-hour taught by K instead of by B. Man, that's big bucks. It's enough to give vice chancellor for administration and finance Jean MacCormack [3. At $133,250.00 she is second from the top in the pay hierarchy on "our" campus. During the brief period of time when "our own" Sherry Penney was acting president of the UMass system (while a national search for Billy Bulger was underway), Jean circulated various revealing PR pieces from her elevated post of acting chancellor. Following the macher scale introduced in Greed 102, Sherry is a 1.62-Mach macher, and Jean ranks 1.33-Mach (to three significant figures).] a case of financial heartburn. If B could be entirely replaced by temp teachers like K (and you can bet the Philistines who run this student-credit-hour factory are just waiting for B's retirement) the administration could gulp down another $48,671.28 (per year!). Pass the Pepto-Bismol, Lou. [4. Louis Esposito, currently provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs, 1.27-Mach.)]

      The behavior of administrators toward temp teachers is morally indistinguishable from that of corporate moguls toward needy third world workers--squeeze as much profit out of them as possible--less for them means more for me. And the same attitude prevails toward students--get as much money from them as is feasible. Students are thus forced to pay for everything but the toilets on a per-use basis. Of course administrators claim their actions are dictated by budgetary constraints--there's just no money. There never is. But they are as secretive about money matters as they can be. And secretiveness suggests manipulations advantageously kept out of sight.

      A student who goes to photocopy a page in the library pays 10 cents, while the administration floods us with stupid memoranda, committee reports, questionnaires, directives, and so on, ad infinitum. Quite directly, the actions of the administrators are teaching the students (and not a few intimidated faculty) the nature of hierarchy and the value--if you want to "succeed" in this system--of not just kowtowing [5. Kowtow -- "to show obsequious deference" -- Merriam Webster dictionary.] to the power structure, but of being eagerly subservient. Thus the student newspaper noted, correctly, the eagerness with which Sherry Penney "found" (the ever-so-elusive) money to clean up those few parts of the campus where the great leader (Bill Clinton) would be, and contrasted that act with her utter disregard for the needs of students, who occupy the rest of the decaying campus every day.

      The students know--and that awareness is continually reinforced--that they are regarded as being at the "bottom" of the academic hierarchy--that they count for shit. The student-faculty run bookstore was taken away from us by the administration and turned over to some greedy entrepreneurial merchant; the food (ha! ha!) services were completely corporatized with elimination of a student-run vegetarian cafeteria in Wheatley Hall; campus police were armed with lethal weapons beginning during the reign of Carlo Golino [6. Former chancellor of UMB, Carlo Golino was one of the more picturesque of the unbroken string of clowns whom the wisdom of the board of directors (called trustees) appointed to run "our" campus.]; the course catalogs were vulgarized with commercial and military advertising; arbitrary parking fees were imposed; students were, and are, taxed with a slew of other administratively-set fees, now to exceed tuition. And all of this was done from what we are supposed to think of as "the top." Those at "the bottom", for whom the university supposedly exists, have had no part in the decisions.

      Do the the students have any role? They have the "right" to complain, as they regularly do when parking and other fees are raised. They have, like naive Russian peasants pleading with the Tsar thought they had, the right to beseech the "top" administrators for a bit of consideration. The Mass Media prints many such plaints. This is, after all, a free country. Happily they are only ignored, not massacred. They can diddle in so-called "student governance", like faculty do in "faculty governance", with negligible effect on the corporate structure--that's what it is--that dominates our lives on the campus. To meet their increased costs students are encouraged to get loans, to go into debt (or additional debt). Corporate America wants us all to be in debt (in order that we pay interest), and the university of course does its part.

      Now back to the use of K and other temp teachers. If you are a student reading this screed, you may ask me: if I believe that K's teaching was very good, then what harm does it do to you if you're taught by K instead of by B? If good teaching can be gotten at less cost, is that bad? (This is a great system of rhetoric--I pose the questions, and then I answer them. I think it's called the Socratic method. How can you lose? You only ask questions that you can answer. Boy, those old philosophers were brilliant tacticians of argumentation.)

      I started Greed 102 with K and B because they are two live people that I experienced. I believe there probably are many other part-timers besides K whose teaching is very good. But I know that quality teaching is not what really concerns the Philistines. What they want is cheap production of student-credit-hours and any other sources of money they can get their hands on. Of course they will chant their mantra, as always, "quality education is our first concern." It's a lie. Their first concern is to maximize and safeguard their own bloated pay. That is their "bottom line." That is why they want to minimize the number of tenured faculty and maximize the number of temp teachers.

      K is part of what corporate PR flacks call "a flexible workforce." With no job security from year to year, at $9,999.60 annual pay, and without benefits, K is sustained by the human interactions that students, friendly colleagues and others provide, but those hardly cover dental work for K's children, [7. Coincidentally, within an hour of when I wrote that sentence I bought a newspaper (Boston Globe, 4-12-97) on the front page of which was an article headlined, "Many in Mass. going without dental care."] not to speak of the luxuries that others, far up on the hierarchical pay scale, regularly enjoy. So, after a while K will become "burned out", tired, discouraged, justifiably feeling used, and the enthusiasm of K's classes will dissipate. Then the students will get what the administration pays for, namely cheap teaching and its inevitable consequence, tired, dispirited teaching. Unless of course the administration is "on its toes" and promptly "let's K go", discarding another used-up "human resource." The administrative machers will then rationalize K's plight as an "unfortunate but inevitable consequence of the need for efficiency." They find human suffering acceptable--as long as it's not inflicted on them.

      When I got The Resource Development Newsletter last Fall at the start of the UMass Boston First campaign to raise $50 million, I was struck at how well-healed some individuals must be to give such large sums of money. In particular, Robert and Peggy Wood reportedly gave $160,000. How did Robert C. Wood, former president of the UMass system, attain such wealth? By being an exemplary, dedicated teacher, of course (ha! ha!). I'll return to him later. However, as I said at the start, [8. In Greed 101, Teaching Greed, second paragraph.] my real targets are not individuals, but institutional structures.