How so? How is "slackerism" the spirit of the university? College students today take more classes, harder classes than ever before. They are under a greater burden to take part in extra-curricular activities to flesh out resumes. They are even pressured into taking unpaid "internships" to advance their career chances. Where is the slackerism.
This is the sort of unsubstantiated attack on college we see in silly books like _Academically Adrift_, which accumulates meaningless data that has no background or control against which to be read and then decries our colleges and universities. When, precisely, was this golden age of higher ed that we've fallen away from?

Captcha was crash and burn. Exactly the right end to the plunge that Goldberg is referring to.

We can't blame the students for their worthlessness anymore. It's the profs.

Time to close up shop.

The profs don't understand that they are part of the culprits that saddle these students with debt. I'd bet the 99% of the profs would say they themselves are underpaid and truly believe higher education should be "free."

They also dont realize the basic fact that to sustainable provide free higher education they need to work for free.

This is Community Organizing at it's best, and unfortunately the end won't be pretty. It never is with spoiled kids who don't think and don't have any adult leadership on their lives.

It figures. Protestors and professors live in a world of theory, where the last thing you want is to have to prove those theories. Naturally, they hate places like Wall Street, where faulty theories die, and those who cling to them lose.

Getting "cred"? With whom? Leftist's getting "cred" from fellow Leftists?
Yeah, that changes the dynamic.

How many Independents? Most of them...based on Obama's poll numbers. The more he touts his "jobs" stimulus, the worse his numbers get. OWS is about trying to give the base something to do, so he doesn't get a primary challenge. It's not about converting Independents.

These protests, like Wisconsin earlier in the year, serve Conservatives' goals well. Many of these protesters are college kids or people fortunate enough to NOT have to work on a weekday at taxpayer expense. Contrast this with the Tea Party weekend warriors...people with jobs.

OWS is Obama's last ditch effort to generate some enthusiasm. If it fizzles, now that he and others have thrown their hat in, he has no prayer next year. You can't win with 25% of the vote...but Obama also knows he can't win without it.

I'm a doctoral candidate about to go on the job market, but this desire to latch onto #OWS does not speak to me (despite the fact that I'm more or less center-left...probably far left by NRO standards). The reason that so many education jobs are "now insecure, part-time jobs" is a combination of two things, both of which can be laid at the feet of the tenure system, and neither of which have anything to do with Wall Street.

The first is the absolute glut of grad students - for at least two decades, programs have been accepting and graduating far more in most fields than there is a demand for. What, exactly, did they think would happen when they flooded the labor market with cheap, desperate labor? Second, the tenure system makes it far too easy for older faculty to check out and use grad students to teach their classes while doing "research", making it a rather cushy job. Why retire and take a pay cut when you can stay employed "full time" and not do anything more than you would have when you're retired? Lack of faculty turnover leads to very low demand, coupled with the high supply from the glut of newly minted PhDs each year.

This leads to the stark have/have-not divide that we see - if you have tenure, you've got a stable job (can't really be fired), you make good-to-great money, and you don't have to do much of anything unless you want to. If you don't have a tenure track job (most people), you don't know from semester to semester if you'll have enough money to put food on the table, half the time you don't have benefits, and you have to work your ass off teaching 6-8 classes a semester if you want to make as much money as the department secretary (if you're lucky), plus keep researching and publishing so that you stay attractive to tenure-track hiring committees. Universities do this because they don't want to hire tenure-track faculty if they don't have to - who wants to hire someone that they can never possibly get rid of, no matter how little they do? They get away with it because, well, they can - again, glut of grad students, minimal demand for their labor.

There's also the dual-track nature of academic hiring decisions - do you hire people who are good teachers and helpful to the students, or do you hire people who bring in lots of grant money? These two things usually don't overlap, but universities favor the grant money, so you end up with people that teach well but aren't interested in grants and research stuck in the adjunct faculty pool, while those who bring in the bucks get the tenure track jobs, teaching skills not required. There aren't enough tenure track jobs (or enough turn over within them) to experiment with different hiring models, so we just stick with more of the same.

Nobody wants to challenge the system (even the adjuncts and grad students who are getting screwed), because everybody dreams of that cushy tenure-track job. Until undergrads vote with their feet and stop applying to grad programs, no change is going to happen. Unfortunately I don't see that happening, because the economy is so pathetic right now that grad school is at least a steady paycheck (if you get in a funded program and get a stipend, anyway - you're crazy if you're actually paying for grad school right now, med-school excepted). If you've already graduated with a useless undergrad degree (a humanities degree with no business-oriented minor or internships, even a straight hard sciences degree often won't get you anywhere if it's in something like biology), making $16k a year as a grad student sounds better than making $15k a year at McDonald's or Wal-Mart.

The big problem is that once you're in the system, there's no easy way to turn out. I've been jaded about this whole thing for two or three years now, but where do I go from here? Who's going to hire a 30 year old with a social sciences degree and no real work experience? Once you're in the academic track, you either follow through or you pretty much have to start over from scratch. You know you should ignore the sunk costs and just get on with it, but you face intense social pressure from the people in your life not to "waste this opportunity", etc.

This was my mistake to make and I can't complain too hard, but I can understand the frustration of these folks even if I think their target is misplaced. The problem is that we were all foolish enough to chose this career path to begin with. If universities were actually interested in the welfare of their grad students they wouldn't have offered us this "opportunity" to begin with, but even at that, we were the ones that took it and thought we'd be the exception to the rule, and get that tenure track job. Even without the financial crisis and without the cuts in state funding, we'd still be facing these problems - the whole #OWS thing is completely tertiary. The system is the problem, and until we fix it pumping more money in won't solve anything (no state will ever have enough money to fund their programs so flush that every grad student that wants one can have a job).

Oh my god, what was that?

Every single person in a random mob must agree (consensus), otherwise nothing can happen?

Frightening.

can we start repeating all the hate-filled reportage and "questions" against this group that were thrown at the Tea Party? Who are the equivalent of the Koch brothers financing this "spontaneous" demonstration? Should we be frightened of their violence? A bunch of very white occupiers won't let a black man (John Lewis) speak, so they must be racists, right? What's with their "hate-filled" rhetoric and name" The Tea Party was a "party" this group "occupies."