September 19, 2022
In bed at 9, up at 3, 2(?)pss, no vino.
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Last few days of astrological summer, fall beginning at 8:04 p.m. on Thursday, 9/22. As it happens, the weather changes then also, noticeably cooler.
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I'm scheduled for my 3rd covid booster shot at 11 a.m. at the VA, the 'bivalent' booster designed to provide more protection against the prevalent omega variant. Joe Biden was interviewed on "60 Minutes" last night and said 'the pandemic is over.' Hundreds of Americans are dying every day of covid, mostly elderly, mostly unvaccinated, mostly with underlying morbidities. More federal funding is needed to reduce the number of unvaccinated and increase the protection of the elderly with underlying morbidities, so Biden's statement the 'the pandemic is over' will be surpassingly unhelpful to the public health folks trying to get that funding. Current CDC figures show 329 covid deaths per day and 4,100 daily new hospital admissions. Joe opens his mouth and another gaffe falls out. Reminds me of the statement allegedly uttered by Obama about his VP: 'Don't underestimate Joe's ability to fuck things up.' . . . . .Very very few people getting the new booster at the VA. 3 or 4, one in a wheelchair. 3 more in the waiting area.
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After watching Breathless yesterday, I watch the first 2/3rds of Godard's Tout Va Bien or 'Everything's OK' with Jane Fonda and Yves Montand. Made 4 years after the May 1968 strike led by French students and joined by much of French society. 1968, was perhaps the most cataclysmic in my life, at least until 2016. Stunning tracking footage along the checkout counters of a supermarket toward the end of the film. I fear I will never again look at a checkout lane at Sendik's again without thinking of Tout Va Bien. The film targets consumer capitalism, the 'establishment', cops, unions, corporate 'news' outlets, marriage, communist hucksterism, and everything about modern life 4 years after the Great Upheaval of 1968. Godard was long a Maoist, anticapitalist, anti-imperialist, anti-Vietnam War, pro-Palestinian, anti-Zionist and accused anti-semite. He didn't seem to enjoy much of modern society or modern life.
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Yesterday's NYTimes carried an article titled "Student Loan Subsidies Could Have Dangerous, Unintended Side Effects." The writer argues that the federal subsidies created in Biden's student debt-relief program could create a perverse incentive for both schools and students to pay less attention to the real cost of the education they provide or seek. This year, the tuition cost of an entering 1st-year law student at Marquette University Law School, where I spent almost a third of my life studying and teaching is $49,710. When I matriculated there in 1967, the tuition was $575 per semester, $1,150 per year. The consumer price index in 1967 was 33.40; the current CPI is somewhat less than 300, a multiple of almost 9 from 1967. The tuition cost has increased by a multiple of more than 43, i.e., approaching 5 times more than the rate of inflation. The administration of the school in 1967 consisted of a dean, a then recently-created assistant deanship, a law librarian, and a part-time assistant librarian. The "leadership team" at the law school now consists of the dean, 4 associate deans, 4 assistant deans, and 11 directors of various programs. My entering class had 119 students; the 2022 class has 177 full-time and a handful of part-time, about 1/3 again as large. The full-time faculty in 1967 numbered 8; in 2022, it's 31 according to the school's website although a few of those are deans or emeritus professors. Thus, while the school's enrollment has increased by barely 1/3, the faculty has at least tripled, the administration has approximately sextupled, and the tuition has increased 43-fold, all while the CPI has increased by only a factor of 9. I do not mean to suggest that Marquette adequately staffed or funded its law school back in 1967; it most assuredly did not. Nonetheless, the legal education provided was most assuredly sufficient to prepare a great many of us for the practice of law. In any event, as the numbers show (at least in part), one need not long wonder how it came to pass that tuition has risen so exorbitantly over the years. What has been true at Marquette and its law school has been true generally in higher education. The higher education industry has regularly opted to increase the cost of its product/service, fueled inevitably by the ready availability of student loans, i.e., student indebtedness. Student debt forgiveness is a complicated issue about which it's hard not to have mixed feelings. But as to where much of the blame lies, I am reminded of Fitzgerald's piercing description in The Great Gatsby: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
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