NY Times: NYU Prof Fired for Holding Standards

[apl68]

Seems a bit harsh on the administrators. I think there are too many of them and their jobs are often largely unnecessary. They often create busy work for others. But there's skill in all that. And a good dean can do a lot of good. It takes a lot of skill to deal with faculty and help departments thrive.

There are jobs for people without university degrees. Some are very skilled. Some are not. They are often demanding and tiring jobs.

To do the job well requires skill and intelligence. Many administrators do not do the job well. But my point is that the post I was referring to confounded skill/intelligence with university education and that's just wrong. Many jobs that do not require any education require quite a bit of skill/intelligence, and many jobs that require a PhD do not. That's leaving aside the fact that even many jobs that do not require much skill are still staffed by people with intelligence, and many people who have a particular type of skill or intelligence lack other kinds. To be honest, I think if you took all my university's professors and made them janitors, many would really flounder. I mean, many of our professors cannot seem to master things like changing the paper in the xerox machine. So throwing around terms like "dumb" and "smart" is...sort of dumb.

If you've done much "unskilled" or "semi-skilled" work, or know many people who have, you'll have a much greater appreciation for what it takes to do these kinds of jobs.  Some of them are also of considerably more value to society than any number of more prestigious jobs.  In paying these sorts of workers so poorly, through inadequate minimum-wage laws and the like, we as a society have really failed to value them.  We've lost sight of the concept of the just wage. 

[quasihumanist]

Let me put out the dismal take on this:

It's clear that there are some jobs where there are relatively few people willing and able to do them relative to the demand, and jobs where there are relatively many people willing and able to do them relative to the demand.

That is all the market tells us.  The wages for a job don't tell us what the job is worth; they only tell us what the supply and demand for that job are.

If we want to say that all people and all work has inherent worth that does not stem from the supply and demand for that kind of work, and I do think we want to say this, then we should use non-market means to say this, not try somehow to distort the market, because the market gives us information.

[dismalist]

Absolutely, quasi: We get paid by how much our fellows value us, not how much we value ourselves.

There's a lovely Nozick essay from 1998 on why intellectuals tend to overvalue themselves.

https://www.libertarianism.org/publications/essays/why-do-intellectuals-oppose-capitalism

Essentially, we all did well in school, so we expect life to be like school. When it isn't, we feel resentful and entitled. :-)

And, importantly, as you say, none of this means that we can't help the unfortunate outside the market.

[Wahoo Redux]

If you've done much "unskilled" or "semi-skilled" work, or know many people who have, you'll have a much greater appreciation for what it takes to do these kinds of jobs.  Some of them are also of considerably more value to society than any number of more prestigious jobs.  In paying these sorts of workers so poorly, through inadequate minimum-wage laws and the like, we as a society have really failed to value them.  We've lost sight of the concept of the just wage.

,

Okay, I wasn't going to weigh in, but because of the gray-collar community I grew up in, and because my parents were very Eisenhower-era people who valued "hard work," and because I had a decade or so of wandering through life, I did a number of low-skill jobs growing up, in college, and as a grad student, everything from working in a shingle factory, dispatching tow trucks, painting the outside of a car dealership, hauling sheetrock, moving furniture, working as a 7/11 night clerk, working for Hickory Farms over Christmas, and twice as a janitor as an undergrad and as a graduate student.  Of these jobs, being a janitor was by far my favorite; it was fast paced enough to make the time fly but not so much that I was stressed out, you could play a radio, and your boss was never around unless you screwed up.  I was frightened by a very large racoon one night but survived to tell the tale.

Given a day or two, professors would be fine janitors.  All of you, with a little practice, would be savants on the cash-register-----I am one of the least math-oriented people ever, and I quickly learned to whip out accurate change and count down a perfectly balanced register at the end of the day.

I take quasihumanist's point about market value, but I would also add that part of the reason janitors are paid minimum wage is that it simply does not take that much knowledge or skill to be a custodian.  The same with hauling sheetrock (although you need to be in pretty good shape), dispatching tow trucks, or any of the jobs on the list.

Twice I've worked for building contractors----and I have never felt so awkward and stupid in my life.  My sister married and then divorced a machinist; he was a very nice, very unlettered man, who had amazing math skills and could work magic with metal.  You want to talk brainwork, talk to construction workers, mechanics, die-casters, lathe workers, electricians, plumbers, and machinists.  These people are well paid (better than most of us, that's for sure) because they have talents and skillsets that the rest of us just don't have and only come after years of apprenticeship and experience. 

It's nice to remind ourselves to be humble, but we should also be real: a just-wage also comes from hard work in a career that not everyone can do.

[Wahoo Redux]

Absolutely, quasi: We get paid by how much our fellows value us, not how much we value ourselves.

There's a lovely Nozick essay from 1998 on why intellectuals tend to overvalue themselves.

https://www.libertarianism.org/publications/essays/why-do-intellectuals-oppose-capitalism

Essentially, we all did well in school, so we expect life to be like school. When it isn't, we feel resentful and entitled. :-)

And, importantly, as you say, none of this means that we can't help the unfortunate outside the market.

I have never, ever met an intellectual who "opposes capitalism." 

A strawman argument means your author has no argument.

[dismalist]

Absolutely, quasi: We get paid by how much our fellows value us, not how much we value ourselves.

There's a lovely Nozick essay from 1998 on why intellectuals tend to overvalue themselves.

https://www.libertarianism.org/publications/essays/why-do-intellectuals-oppose-capitalism

Essentially, we all did well in school, so we expect life to be like school. When it isn't, we feel resentful and entitled. :-)

And, importantly, as you say, none of this means that we can't help the unfortunate outside the market.

I have never, ever met an intellectual who "opposes capitalism." 

A strawman argument means your author has no argument.

"I am not crazy; my reality is just different from yours."

[quasihumanist]

Twice I've worked for building contractors----and I have never felt so awkward and stupid in my life.  My sister married and then divorced a machinist; he was a very nice, very unlettered man, who had amazing math skills and could work magic with metal.  You want to talk brainwork, talk to construction workers, mechanics, die-casters, lathe workers, electricians, plumbers, and machinists.  These people are well paid (better than most of us, that's for sure) because they have talents and skillsets that the rest of us just don't have and only come after years of apprenticeship and experience. 

It's nice to remind ourselves to be humble, but we should also be real: a just-wage also comes from hard work in a career that not everyone can do.

And I'll repeat - we have a problem that there aren't enough good jobs for dumb people, and by that I don't mean unlettered people.  Lots of people fail out of plumbing school, or get into an apprenticeship and find out they just aren't good enough to make it.

Here, we have dropped the standards for our CS degrees, but we also have enough good students that the C students can see they are getting pity passes.  Some of them have given up but figure the degree is still worth it even though they won't get a job from it; some of them don't care.  Very few are that clueless about required job skills.

[Wahoo Redux]

Absolutely, quasi: We get paid by how much our fellows value us, not how much we value ourselves.

There's a lovely Nozick essay from 1998 on why intellectuals tend to overvalue themselves.

https://www.libertarianism.org/publications/essays/why-do-intellectuals-oppose-capitalism

Essentially, we all did well in school, so we expect life to be like school. When it isn't, we feel resentful and entitled. :-)

And, importantly, as you say, none of this means that we can't help the unfortunate outside the market.

I have never, ever met an intellectual who "opposes capitalism." 

A strawman argument means your author has no argument.

"I am not crazy; my reality is just different from yours."

It's never a bad idea for one to consider the idea that one might actually be crazy.  Or just frustrated.

Your author is a whiny snowflake.

[Hibush]

And I'll repeat - we have a problem that there aren't enough good jobs for dumb people, and by that I don't mean unlettered people.  Lots of people fail out of plumbing school, or get into an apprenticeship and find out they just aren't good enough to make it.

I recall a remark from the owner of the Seth Thomas clockworks in Connecticut. He said something to the effect that other employers talk about hiring the best and brightest. But that was not the priority at Seth Thomas. Making clocks is really repetitive work and people get the hang of it fairly quickly. The company needed to find people who would find that work challenging enough to keep it interesting day after day.

[quasihumanist]

And I'll repeat - we have a problem that there aren't enough good jobs for dumb people, and by that I don't mean unlettered people.  Lots of people fail out of plumbing school, or get into an apprenticeship and find out they just aren't good enough to make it.

I recall a remark from the owner of the Seth Thomas clockworks in Connecticut. He said something to the effect that other employers talk about hiring the best and brightest. But that was not the priority at Seth Thomas. Making clocks is really repetitive work and people get the hang of it fairly quickly. The company needed to find people who would find that work challenging enough to keep it interesting day after day.

I wrote "not enough good jobs", not "no good jobs".

[jerseyjay]

And I'll repeat - we have a problem that there aren't enough good jobs for dumb people, and by that I don't mean unlettered people.  Lots of people fail out of plumbing school, or get into an apprenticeship and find out they just aren't good enough to make it.

Here, we have dropped the standards for our CS degrees, but we also have enough good students that the C students can see they are getting pity passes.  Some of them have given up but figure the degree is still worth it even though they won't get a job from it; some of them don't care.  Very few are that clueless about required job skills.

I am not sure I agree with the premise that there are dumb people and smart people. Even if I could learn how to be a janitor, I am not at all sure I could get through plumbing school or make it through a trades apprenticeship. That is to say, without getting into stuff like "learning styles," there are people who are quite good at certain skills and not so good at others, so to flatten out human intelligence seems wrong. Having worked on standardized testing, I know that while tests are designed to create nice bell curves by having questions that do a good job of discriminating (differentiating) among test takers, they are designed to do so on rather narrow constructs, and a test focusing on a different skill would create a very different bell curve.

But even if one could rank people on a dumb-smart continuum like one can on a short-tall continuum, it does not necessary follow that there would be a neat overlay between dumb jobs and jobs that do not require a degree, and smart jobs and those that do. Some jobs that do not require any training are "dumb" jobs--i.e., require little skill of any sort. But there are also a large number of jobs that require a degree that do not require real skill beyond basic literary--so called Oblomov jobs.

[ciao_yall]

I take quasihumanist's point about market value, but I would also add that part of the reason janitors are paid minimum wage is that it simply does not take that much knowledge or skill to be a custodian.  The same with hauling sheetrock (although you need to be in pretty good shape), dispatching tow trucks, or any of the jobs on the list.

I would argue that wages are a function of power, not of productivity. Janitors, haulers, etc are paid low wages because they come from sectors of society that do not have a lot of social or political power. This is why many are undocumented.

I can assure you these jobs are essential to the happy functioning of any enterprise, still, if a company can get away with paying less, why should they pay more for any function? Janitor, CEO, salesperson...

[marshwiggle]

I take quasihumanist's point about market value, but I would also add that part of the reason janitors are paid minimum wage is that it simply does not take that much knowledge or skill to be a custodian.  The same with hauling sheetrock (although you need to be in pretty good shape), dispatching tow trucks, or any of the jobs on the list.

I would argue that wages are a function of power, not of productivity. Janitors, haulers, etc are paid low wages because they come from sectors of society that do not have a lot of social or political power. This is why many are undocumented.

That's kind of a circular argument. If it were true, then in countries without a lot of undocumented workers all of those jobs should pay much more. Granted, countries with stronger worker protections will pay more for those jobs in absolute terms, but they are still at the bottom of the pay scale for those countries. Supply and demand is a real thing; the more people who could do a job, the easier it is to hire for the job, so the less it has to pay.

[dismalist]

I take quasihumanist's point about market value, but I would also add that part of the reason janitors are paid minimum wage is that it simply does not take that much knowledge or skill to be a custodian.  The same with hauling sheetrock (although you need to be in pretty good shape), dispatching tow trucks, or any of the jobs on the list.

I would argue that wages are a function of power, not of productivity. Janitors, haulers, etc are paid low wages because they come from sectors of society that do not have a lot of social or political power. This is why many are undocumented.

That's kind of a circular argument. If it were true, then in countries without a lot of undocumented workers all of those jobs should pay much more. Granted, countries with stronger worker protections will pay more for those jobs in absolute terms, but they are still at the bottom of the pay scale for those countries. Supply and demand is a real thing; the more people who could do a job, the easier it is to hire for the job, so the less it has to pay.

Yes, it is a tautology, for how do we know who has power? They pay low wages or receive high wages! But because of competition, labor productivity is everything in determining wages.

[Caracal]

Given a day or two, professors would be fine janitors.  All of you, with a little practice, would be savants on the cash-register-----I am one of the least math-oriented people ever, and I quickly learned to whip out accurate change and count down a perfectly balanced register at the end of the day.

I had a lot of practice, and I was not a savant on the cash register. It's not that I didn't know how to operate the thing-or the computer system it was linked to. I did learn how to troubleshoot and fix small mistakes over time. On a quiet night everything was fine. But, when things got busy and there was a long line, I really struggled. I could make change, I could fix problems, I could be nice to customers, I could deal with complaints they had. What I couldn't do was do all that quickly and efficiently as the line got longer and longer. There were people who were really good at that and it really is a skill