Utterly shameful

Margaret Mary Vojtko was a professor of French at Duquesne University for 25 years. She died of a heart attack at the age of 83 after struggling with cancer for a number of years.

She was an adjunct professor. Do you know what that means?

As amazing as it sounds, Margaret Mary, a 25-year professor, was not making ends meet. Even during the best of times, when she was teaching three classes a semester and two during the summer, she was not even clearing $25,000 a year, and she received absolutely no health care benefits. Compare this with the salary of Duquesne’s president, who makes more than $700,000 with full benefits.

Meanwhile, in the past year, her teaching load had been reduced by the university to one class a semester, which meant she was making well below $10,000 a year. With huge out-of-pocket bills from UPMC Mercy for her cancer treatment, Margaret Mary was left in abject penury. She could no longer keep her electricity on in her home, which became uninhabitable during the winter. She therefore took to working at an Eat’n Park at night and then trying to catch some sleep during the day at her office at Duquesne. When this was discovered by the university, the police were called in to eject her from her office. Still, despite her cancer and her poverty, she never missed a day of class.

What that means is the university hires a highly trained professional for a pittance and strings them along with temporary assignments year after year, giving them no benefits and no retirement funds, and can simply not renew their contract whenever they feel like it. It’s indentured servitude with no job security at all and paying them less than the custodians make.

About half the teaching staff at American colleges are adjuncts. This is a position that initially had some reasonable utility; here at UMM we hire temporary faculty to fill positions when professors go on sabbatical, and sometimes to address temporary surges in the student population, but at many colleges they’ve become a way to stretch their limited funds…at the expense of the very people who fulfill the primary function of the university. It has become a disgraceful practice, much abused, and harms both the quality of the education (not because these are bad teachers, but because the constant shuffling of staff erodes the continuity and consistency of the curriculum), and also represent gross exploitation of those faculty.

Duquesne is a Catholic university, which ought to shame people who claim an exalted moral status, but this isn’t a Catholic problem. It’s going on at most universities. If you’ve got a faculty member who plays such a role that you keep hiring them year after year for 25 years, you have no excuse other than your miserliness for not promoting them to a permanent position. What Duquesne did was simply abusive oppression, taking advantage of someone in particularly desperate straits.

The Director of the Campus Ministry at Duquesne made excuses.

I knew Margaret Mary well. When we learned of problems with her home, she was invited to live with us in the formation community at Laval House on campus, where she resided for several weeks over the past year.

Over the course of Margaret Mary’s illness I, along with other Spiritan priests, visited with her regularly. In addition, the university and the Spiritan priests at Duquesne offered several other types of assistance to her.

Mr. Kovalik’s use of an unfortunate death to serve an alternative agenda is sadly exploitive and is made worse because his description of the circumstances bears no resemblance to reality.

No, the reality is very familiar — I’ve known many people who have been taken advantage of by the adjunct system. I’m wondering what “other types of assistance” a gang of priests offered her that could possibly compensate for the fact that they starved her with degrading wages for 25 years? I reckon that if they paid her $25K for 25 years when a more reasonable professorial salary is closer to $50K, offering her an envelope with $625,000 in it might have been fair. I suspect that what they offered Margaret Mary Vojtko, who was apparently quite devout, was a little hand-holding and prayer…nothing helpful, in other words.

What was sadly exploitive is Duquesne’s short-sighted abuse of adjunct faculty.

Like cattle

Christopher Jackson of Chandler, Arizona needs to be put away for a long, long time. He has some peculiar notions about how to interact with women.

The woman told police the two of them went to a baseball game together, and after the game, Jackson wanted to go dancing. The woman told Jackson she was too tired to do that. He "offered her a pill to energize her," according to court documents.

Not feeling energized after taking the pill, Jackson gave her two more. The woman passed out shortly after taking the other two pills, according to court documents.

She woke up in Jackson’s bed in severe pain, and discovered that Jackson had branded her. She said she saw Jackson with the branding equipment and butane torch, according to the documents.

The woman told police that Jackson "bragged" to her that he’d done that to other girlfriends in the past and explained to her that he wanted to do the same thing to her because "her vagina was his," court documents state.

How can a human being in 21st century America reach middle age while holding these indescribably vile attitudes? And he claims to have done this multiple times?

Catholics really do despise women

If only I’d read this information before I sent my daughter off to college! Apparently, it was a bad idea — according to Fix The Family, I shouldn’t have done it, and they have six seven eight absolutely solid reasons. (It’s so well-written: the title is “Six reasons to not send your daughter to college”, but it actually lists eight.)

  1. She will attract the wrong types of men. Apparently, the universities are full of “lazy men who are looking for a mother-figure in a wife are very attracted to this responsible, organized, smart woman who has it all together along with a steady paying job with benefits.” I think it’s nice that this web site is so egalitarian: not only do they want to deprive women of an education, but they also have nothing but contempt for the men who are getting one.

    Clearly, I’m going to have to have a little talk with my daughter’s boyfriend.

  2. She will be in a near occasion of sin. This is my favorite excuse: sex produces hormones that befuddle the female mind, making them overlook the faults in those horrible lazy college men.

    Catholic OB-GYN Dr. Kim Hardey notes that a woman is naturally very observant of a man’s faults as long as she is in a platonic relationship with him. Once she becomes sexually active with him, she releases hormones that mask his faults, and she remains in a dreamy state about him. We can see why God would arrange things in such a way so that when in a proper state of holy matrimony, she would be less sensitive to his faults and thereby less tempted to be critical of him.

    I have relied on surges of estrogen, progesterone, and oxytocin to keep my wife in a confused state for years. How else would she stay with me? So this must be true.

  3. She will not learn to be a wife and mother. Yep, that’s right: we don’t offer college courses in cooking, cleaning, changing diapers, all that womanly work. So what good is it?

  4. The cost of a degree is becoming more difficult to recoup. “Like anything that is subsidized by the government, the cost of a college degree is inflated.” Wait, what? Subsidized education is more expensive? That makes no sense. Besides,

    It makes much more sense for a young couple to have a husband with a skill that brings value to the marketplace that has reasonable compensation to go along with it and a wife who is willing to be frugal especially during the early years of starting their family.

    So send the man to school to acquire skills that have value, but don’t send the woman to school because schools don’t teach skills that have value. Mmm-k.

  5. You don’t have to prove anything to the world. Women only go to school to show off.

  6. It could be a near occasion of sin for the parents. School is so expensive, you know. “So parents may avoid having more children with contraception, sterilization, or illicit use of NFP to bear this cost.” Investing in your children compromises your ability to have more children.

  7. She will regret it. In years to come, they will be so sad about wasting their most fertile child-bearing years improving their minds instead of their uteruses.

  8. It could interfere with a religious vocation. This is the most terrible one of all: Catholic seminaries will not accept you if you have a load of college debt!

And there’s more! If you watch this video from Fix the Family, you also learn that “We have a little problem with depopulation, and we need these young ladies to be havin’ babies.”

Avicenna beat me to it!

I think I’ll pass on This vs. That, too

Skepchick earlier reported on This vs. That, a poor man’s version of Mythbusters that was actually more like a reanimated version of the thankfully deceased Man Show. The creators have since turned to twitter in a manic campaign to get people to watch their awful show. Take a look at their feed — it’s spam city. I’m surprised it hasn’t been taken down already.

They sent me a couple of tweets offering a discount code and HUGE SAVINGS and urging me to watch their show. I turned them down, rudely, saying they were cheesy sexist shit. They replied.

@thisvsthatshow: @pzmyers I’m now aware you’re a cantankerous fuck. You’ll find my response to your baseless allegations, here: http://ow.ly/oMXXB

Hmmm. I find your approach enticing. Who’s in charge of your PR?

I did check out their response. It’s actually a reply to Phil Plait, who said exactly what I said, but much more politely, because he’s Phil Plait.

Thank you for the note. However, I have decided not to watch the show. I watched the trailers, and found them to be off-putting, to say the least. I know they were trying to be tongue-in-cheek, but the sexism in the trailers completelye dissuaded me from wanting to see the show. Also, the use of “booth babes” at Dragon Con (and the tweets promoting them) pretty much sealed the deal for me.

I have written several times about sexism – and sometimes outright misogyny – in the skeptical and scientific communities. I want to promote getting more young girls interested in these topic so they can grow up to be scientists, and not have to deal with institutional and cultural sexism. Given the way you promoted the show (as well as only having men as guests, apparently), I don’t see “This Vs That” as furthering this cause, and in fact would appear to impede it. For that reason, I won’t be promoting it.

That Phil. He’s a pretty good guy. Seeing his email is the only thing of worth in the This Vs. That reaction.

Hotchkiss’s (the creator of the show) response is complaining that he needs to parade around booth babes in skimpy outfits (with two of them wearing lab coats!) because it’s the only way to get his show noticed. He really wants to get more women in science.

But…when he lists his participants and advisors, they are all men. He has an excuse!

@thisvsthatshow: @futilityfiles We invited more than a dozen women scientists to appear on This vs That. ALL of them turned us down!

Yeah? I wonder why. Maybe we can see part of it in his twitter campaign.

@thisvsthatshow: @rickygervais Finally, a TV series that will help you get laid. Promise. http://ow.ly/oFWso

And he denies that he’s a sexist. Right. This is the approach that will get more women in science — tell the men that it will get them laid.

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Completely unrealistic and more than a little misogynistic

Hey! Hey! I’ll have you know I read the webcomics every morning for a bit of humor and escapism, not to have my faith in humanity shattered further and my cynicism enhanced. So I was reading Something Positive…

Oh, wait. That’s what S*P does. Never mind.

Anyway, I saw this comic and thought, “WTF?”

nightwingnaked

And it’s true. DC Comics is having a contest to give a lucky fan the opportunity to draw one page of their comic book, and the challenge is to audition by drawing a woman character naked and about to kill herself.

This comment says it all:

“I’m a sequential art student, and I find it a bit appalling that the requirement for panel 4 is essentially drawing a female character committing suicide naked,” said one commenter, Seairra Willett, in response to DC’s announcement. “The sexualisation of suicide is something I will not be putting effort into for a talent search,” she added. Many agreed. “This has to be the most repulsive thing DC Comics has done in a while,” said Rae Grimm. Others pointed out that the week of September 10th is National Suicide Prevention Week, but the main thrust of the response was that a strong female character was being reduced to a sexualized nothing, and put in a situation that is, at best, unpleasant.

As any true fan of the comics knows, this is an impossible scenario. How will she stuff herself into a refrigerator after she’s dead?

‘private re-homing’

America, home of all those anti-abortion fanatics, has developed a bit of an international reputation.

The failure to keep track of what happens after children are brought to America troubles some foreign governments. So do instances of neglect or abuse that become known. Often cited is the case of the Tennessee woman who returned a 7-year-old boy she adopted from a Russian orphanage. The woman had cared for him only six months when she put the boy on a flight to Moscow in April 2010. He was accompanied by a typed letter that read in part, "I no longer wish to parent this child."

Late last year, Russia banned adoptions by Americans amid a broader diplomatic dispute. Other nations, including Guatemala and China, have also made the process more difficult. As a result, the number of foreign-born children adopted into the United States has declined from a peak of almost 23,000 in 2004 to fewer than 10,000 a year today.

Read the whole thing; it’s a long, multi-part exposé of shameful abuse of adopted children and terrifyingly bad government oversight. It seems that once you’ve brought a child over from a foreign country, or adopted one from American agencies, it’s fairly easy to renege on your responsibilities: using a short legal document, you can grant power of attorney for the child to just about anyone, and just hand them over, a process called “private re-homing” — it’s easier to swap a kid with a stranger than it is to adopt a pet from a shelter.

There are active bulletin boards on the net in which parents can, for instance, talk about their troublesome adopted child and ask if anyone would care to take them off their hands. Guess who loves those boards? Pedophiles and serial child abusers, of course. The deeper you read into that article, the more disgusted you will become.

Parenting is about commitment and responsibility. It’s a disgrace that the many adoptive parents who know that and do right by their children have to live with a system that also tolerates flibbertigibbets and attention-seeking frauds who want validation as a parent and contemptible sex offenders. This is a situation in which tightening up regulations and oversight can do no harm to the truly caring parents, but can also keep children out of the hands of creeps.

Oh, those secular ethics

In case you’re interested, DJ Grothe will be speaking at the Midwest Philosophy Colloquium on the University of Minnesota Morris campus next week. I can’t attend; it’s scheduled at the same time as one of our HHMI student research events.

He’s speaking on secular ethics.

By the way, of no possible relevance at all, I’m sure, Grothe is threatening legal action against Women Thinking, Inc., and is holding up publication of a survey on vaccination outreach, because he doesn’t like that someone reported a bad joke that he made. Which he denies.

Secular ethics in action!

Man, am I glad I have a good excuse to not attend that talk. I’m going to enjoy celebrating students’ summer research instead.

Oh, yay! More examples of secular ethics!

Consciousness raising needed

There is a petition asking Richard Dawkins to retract his trivializing of victims of sexual abuse. I’m really not interested in a retraction; he’s a smart guy, I’d rather see him have a conversation about these issues, and come to a better understanding of why people find his statements repugnant.

If you sign it, please leave a comment asking him to think more deeply about the position he’s taken, and to try to understand why people care about what he says.