And Speaking of Exploitative & Oppressive Structures...

The IRS has just put colleges and universities on notice not to under-estimate the number of hours that adjunct faculty work. Many schools only count the number of hours in the classroom, as opposed to counting time spent preparing or grading (these, combined, far exceed the number of hours spent in the classroom; for every 70-minute lecture that I give, I spend between 8-14 hours writing it). But, thanks to Obamacare, working more than 30 hours a week for an employer makes one eligible for health insurance. 

This is so great, right?! The federal government totally gets that many college professors in this country are adjunct or part-time and that, as such, they earn minimal ducats and often have no benefits of any kind. 

Sadly, no. Some schools are already taking steps to cut adjunct faculty hours so that they will not have to shoulder the burden of providing health insurance for their employees. Which begs the question: Doesn't it seem like university professors and administrators would recognize that it is in their best interests (economic, institution-building, quality of teaching, flexibility) to support single-payer health insurance?

Undoing the University

My colleague and pal, Dom Tyranny, turned me on to The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. Which is fabulous. Reading between the lines, it seems that an enterprising group of Columbia PhD students (and recent PhDs) have decided that the horrendous status quo of the academic job market is not in their best economic interests, and have decided on an alternative model, in which students pay a significantly reduced fee to the faculty, who keeps most of it.

The Institute "provides liberal arts educational opportunities to local communities. At the same time, it provides material and intellectual support and space for young scholars to teach, write, research, publish and, put simply, work." The Institute's website addresses directly the economic exploitation inherent in the adjunct faculty system:

"You might not believe it, but academic institutions are not always compensating their employees at what you would call – in any other industry – “fair rates.” Only a tiny percentage ever become tenured professors, and the vast majority end up either simply quitting or becoming adjunct professors. What’s an adjunct professor, you ask? Why, adjunct professors are the people who teach approximately 75% of all university and college classes nation-wide. They’re just like regular professors, but instead of getting paid a living wage, they get paid less than a fry cook at McDonald’s. How much less? Well for an average 3-credit course, an adjunct will get paid somewhere around $3000-$4000. With no benefits. To catch up with that fry cook, an adjunct professor would have to teach anywhere from 4-6 classes a year, still with no benefits. Two to three times more than the number of classes an average professor teaches.... [snip] Let’s say you and 39 of your closest friends got together and took one of these courses just for your personal education and betterment. Let’s be conservative and say you and your buddies paid $4000 for your course. Just that one class has produced $160,000 in revenue for the university. And, remember, we’re talking a non-certificate bearing, post-baccalaureate style class here. So we can’t just say its all going to the value of the degree or some other such nonsense – not that that’s such a riveting argument in the first place. In any case, depending on the benevolence of the university, somewhere around 2% of that  $160,000 in revenue is going to go to the worker who most directly contributed to making it."

The Institute's response harks back to the eleventh and twelfth centuries, before universities were around. Monasteries had schools to educate boys for the cloister; cathedrals did, as well. Cathedral schools, often located in urban centers, drew scholars (like Anselm of Laon) and students (like John of Salisbury) interested in liberal arts subjects, like grammar and dialectic (logic). The schools in Paris, especially at the Cathedral of Notre-Dame and the abbeys of St. Victor and Ste. Genevieve, were educational centers. They attracted more scholars, like Peter Abelard, who took on students of their own. Scholars taught in rented rooms in taverns, to students who paid them directly and by the piece (the lecture). There was no set curriculum, nor did courses lead to a credential; scholars and students associated at will, or at whim. The scholar's life in early twelfth-century Paris was no more lavish than in early twenty first-century New York, but it was not constrained by economically exploitative institutions, called universities. I hope the faculty at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research find their medieval experiment to be a success. 

Geometry teaches her students. I be she got paid, directly, per student.

The Post-Solstice Solar Return

Medieval Robots is two years old! Since I started this blog two years ago over 25,000 people (and bots) have come to check it out. And I'm on Twitter, thanks to Hurricane Sandy. I hope to have some more exciting news about the medieval robots of my own research in 2013. In the meantime, thanks for reading, and have a happy New Year and a wonderful 2013 of your own. 

In honor of the second birthday of this blog, here are two relevant statistics.

The most popular post is Ye Olde Replicants, with over 1900 views. I wonder how popular it is over at RadioLab? 

The most popular search term that drives traffic to this site is: Robocop.

Eschatology, Again

Well, I guess that whole Mayan thing didn't pan out. 

Msc. Bibl. 140, Bamberg Apocalypse, fol. 32v

Kind of like in the Middle Ages, when a number of clerics, theologians, and political figures thought that the Second Coming would happen in the year 1000. Otto III, the Holy Roman Emperor, commissioned a luxurious illuminated version of the Book of Revelation (the Bamberg Apocalypse), and pursued a policy of linking his reign to those of Constantine (through his association with Pope Sylvester II) and Charlemagne (by visiting his tomb at Pentecost in 1000). The desire to create an environment that would demonstrate to God that the faithful were deserving of his return led, in part, to one of the most important social justice movements of the Middle Ages: The Peace of God. And the wealthy were worried enough about the possibility for the imminent arrival of Judgement Day that they gave land and gifts to monasteries, which, in turn, built new churches. Ralph (Radolfus) Glaber, a monk from that period, wrote that "It was as if the whole world had shaken off the dust of the ages and covered itself in the white mantle of churches." 

Once the year 1000 came and went without major event, people re-dated their calculations to the year 1033, a millennium after Jesus' death, rather than his birth. That came and went, but it didn't slow down the apocalyptic prophets.

Robots Are Taking Our Jobs, Says Krugman. Next They'll be NYT Columnists!

According to Paul Krugman, the nineteenth century is the new black. Robber barons, David Ricardo, Das Kapital--it's all very now. Except then all the robots are going to steal our jobs. 
 "...there’s no question that in some high-profile industries, technology is displacing workers of all, or almost all, kinds. For example, one of the reasons some high-technology manufacturing has lately been moving back to the United States is that these days the most valuable piece of a computer, the motherboard, is basically made by robots, so cheap Asian labor is no longer a reason to produce them abroad." 
But the robots won't be satisfied with only manufacturing jobs! They want to perform highly-skilled labor.
"[snip] Many of the jobs being displaced are high-skill and high-wage; the downside of technology isn’t limited to menial workers."
Technology is putting labor at a disadvantage, and growing monopoly power enriches plutocrats. The result is an increasingly classist, two-tiered society.
And suddenly we live in a horrible dystopia predicted in the classic Weimar sci-fi expressionist film!

A Thanksgiving Miracle

Amazing, amazing news: All of the images--all of the data--in the British Library Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts is now available in the public domain for non-commercial use. Thank you, thank you! Now we need the other great libraries and museums to put their manuscript images and meta-data in the public domain. One can only imagine that other institutions will be reviewing their policies in light of this game-changing development. 

Will Noel, former manuscripts curator at The Walters Museum and newly-appointed Director of Special Collections Center and SIMS at Penn, has spoken eloquently and persuasively about the benefits of making this data freely available. Digital humanities has enhanced medieval studies enormously. Making the PL and MGH searchable on-line has the potential to rejuvenate the history of ideas, and making manuscript images usable by many people promotes collaboration and scholarship and increases the net amount of delight and beauty in the world. Not bad. 

And, in honor of the feast of Thanksgiving, here's another feast:

The meeting of Lancelot and Guinevere, in Lancelot do lac, Royal MS 20 D.iv. British Library.

 

Nate Silver's Medieval Ancestor

As you've no doubt heard, Nate Silver's total win of everything that happens, ever, has prompted suspicion of his methods. Mark Coddington's astute reading of the mistrust of Silver by political journalists eloquently framed the central issue: Nate Silver's methods are epistemologically different from a political journalist's--scientific method vs. analysis & discernment. Is Nate Silver a Witch? took this a step further, by mocking political journalists' and Republican pundits' insistence on their own certainty and complete dismissal of Silver's rational methods.

This narrative of faith vs. science strongly recalls the legends of Gerbert of Aurillac in William of Malmesbury's Gesta Regum Anglorum. Gerbert, who reigned as Pope Sylvester II from 999-1003, had, according to legend, created an oracular head that revealed the future to him. Prior to William, writing ca. 1125, chroniclers had insisted that Gerbert's speaking head relied on demonic magic. This was largely due to the fact that, in the 10th and 11th centuries, prediction and forecasting (with the exception of prognostication of the weather and calendrical reckoning) were thought to require demons. But William changed the story, attributing Gerbert's head to celestial forces--the particular conjunction of the planets and stars. By William's era, cosmological and astronomical texts in Arabic, Greek, and Hebrew were increasingly translated into Latin. Many of these treatises involved the accurate measurement of heavenly bodies for the specific purpose of divination (for medical reasons, to answer questions or offer advice, or to cast natal charts). Predicting the future was, now, something that did not require demons but could instead be based on scientific methods. 

Gerbert was an early pioneer in the mathematic and astronomical sciences of the quadrivium in the tenth century. And after he died? He was the sorcerer-pope who traded his soul to the Devil for foreknowledge.

Cod. Pal. germ. 137, Folio 216v. Martinus Oppaviensis, Chronicon pontificum et imperatorum. c1460. Courtesy of Heidelberg University.