Generally, I think things run more smoothly for all of us when we focus on celebrating life. Appreciation is a more potent tonic for the human condition than pointing fingers. But we all have a right to point out hypocrisy. And that’s what I’m about to do.

 

Many of you have heard me say a thousand times, “Enjoy your food. Don’t pay too much for it. Don’t waste it.” It’s not only The Savvy Foodist philosophy, it’s common sense.  The reason I began my work as The Savvy Foodists is because that philosophy is so potent and so powerful, there’s no doubt that when we begin to apply it to the way we nourish ourselves, it naturally spills over into all areas of our lives.   My entire philosophy can be summed up in “Enjoy your life and don’t waste it.”

 

Don’t waste your resources. Don’t waste opportunities. Don’t waste energy. Don’t waste your lovers or friends or any of your relationships. Don’t waste your intelligence. Don’t waste your talent. Don’t waste! Don’t waste! Don’t waste!

 

I learned this lesson from being an adjunct college professor for eight years. Unfortunately I learned it by negative example. Colleges and Universities are the most wasteful, parasitic organizations on the planet. They claim that they hold the keys to living a life of wealth and success. I know the colleges I went to did that. Then, just yesterday, I got a letter from my graduate alma matter begging me for money. It reminded me why I left college teaching to begin with: their poor management of resources.

 

The colleges model is outdated. For those of us who want to be vital and succeed in life their lessons are useless to us. Their educational leaders do not work in industry. They are not active. They don’t stay current.  Don’t know what’s happening outside their cozy little offices or catered faculty parties.  Their experience comes from watching TV. Colleges and Universities do nothing to empower students to live their dreams and they fail to pay the majority of their faculty a living wage.

 

Colleges are erected to allow their tenured faculty to remain protected within an Ivory Tower. They’re set up as Feudal systems. The tenure track profs. are the lords.  The adjunct faculty and students, the peasants, present only to to serve the lords.

 

What happens to the Feudal Lords when the peasants realize they outnumber their masters 10 to 1?

 

It’s what colleges are terrified of. They’re afraid we’ll all realize they have nothing to teach us and that we don’t need them any more. They’re afraid we’ll discover that cutting-edge industry training is far superior to, and more practical than sociology courses or literary criticism classes. They’re afraid we’ll realize the truth. That starting a career in an economy like this with a $100,000.00 student loan on our backs is more of a liability than an asset.

 

Now I hear that Universities and Colleges have decided to prey upon students by offering degrees in Sustainability. I can’t believe the audacity. The organizations crying the loudest that they have no money and no resources are claiming they’re gonna to teach us sustainability. Unbelievable!

 

Let me share with you some of my experiences teaching at Columbia College, DePaul, and Loyola: considered three of the best learning institutions in Chicago.

 

I was expected to attend faculty meetings for which I was not paid. Walmart got reamed for doing this to its employees a few years ago.  I’ve noticed no one has ever criticized colleges for doing this all the time to their adjunct faculty. At least the Walmart employees made minimum wage. Once my partner and I added up the amount of time I spent teaching and grading work compared to what I was paid. It added up to around 50 cents an hour.

I was expected to keep weekly office hours to meet with students: also unpaid. I was forced to pay to park on campus: even though I taught there! I was constantly expected to spend my time and my resources without reimbursement or compensation. In the end I realized it cost me more to be a teacher than to be unemployed.  There was an attitude among the administration and tenure profs. that I should consider it a privilege that I was asked to teach to begin with. But the truth is, neither my family nor I could feed ourselves on this elitist attitude.

 

 Their justification? “We have no money.” I’m sure those of you who are still struggling under the weight of your enormous student loans are aware of just how much money you were pumping into your schools every semester. Tell, me, was our expense ever justified?

 

Private universities like Depaul justified the insane tuition by telling their students their institution was superior to others, like state schools. And yet the they employed me, a graduate of a state school (at slave wages) as one of their teachers. Every Depaul student I ever taught got my state school education, second hand from me, at ten times the cost I paid for it. I once told that to a freshman student of mine who was already in debt for $100,000.00 in student loans. She turned a sickly green.

 

The highest amount of money I ever made as a full time college teacher with a TERMINAL degree was $15,000. The highest amount of money I ever made at a part time job while I was an undergraduate without a degree was $16,000. I often wondered when I was a teacher why I’d ever gotten my degrees.

 

In the late 90′s, early 00′s I was teaching fiction writing in the English department at Loyola University. There was only one other person in the department teaching this class. He was a tenured professor who made ten times my salary. We were both doing the same job. (Actually I was doing more. I was also teaching comp. and research that semester. He was only teaching the one Fiction class two days a week.) He made made 10x my salary. He had health benefits. He had security. He could park for free on campus. I spent every paycheck wondering how I’d pay my rent and take care of my family. Loyola’s answer for the discrepancy in our salaries? “We don’t have the money to pay you.”

 

I had fifteen students in my Fiction class. My students told me often how they were paying $70,000.00 a year to attend Loyola. If they had used just one of my student’s tuition dollars from my fiction class to pay me a years salary of $70, 000.00 they would have had $980,000.00 left from the other students in my class. Think about that for a second. $980,000.00! Just for 14 students!

 

Their answer to me when I asked them why I was being paid so poorly? “We have no money to pay you.”

 

 You want to know why they didn’t pay me a living wage?

 

Colleges and Universities don’t really value education. If they valued education they would pay their teachers FIRST. Then they’d figure out sustainable ways to make their campuses run. Why don’t they do this? Because they don’t value teachers, their primary resource and they know nothing about sustainability.

 

Here’s some more of the things I saw repeatedly when I was in college and when I taught:

 

 

  • Students left college as seniors more confused about their career paths then when they’d entered as freshman.

  • Empty buildings were heated, cooled and lit for hours and hours every day. (sometimes for whole days) The energy waste was staggering.

  • Money that could be used to pay teachers was often spent on catered affairs for tenure professors.

  • Departments set policies to force teachers to make grading the result of a series of steps. In other words, if students followed the steps they’d get the grades. Success was less about competence than it was about the ability to ape.

  • The bar for success was very low. Large classrooms of “honor” students had no idea how to put words together or what a noun, verb or adjective even were.

  • Professors taught the same classes they had taught 20 years before with no concern for changes in industry, theory or practicality.

  • College professors got together with their friends to create their own in-house print sources so that they could tell incoming students that they were well-published and highly regarded in the publishing industry. Students were also required to purchase textbooks written by their professors that were otherwise not selling. This way professors made more money off their students and they didn’t have to grow to be able compete in the marketplace.

  • Students’ opinions about what was valuable to their education was disregarded by the administration. Students evaluations mean nothing.

  • Subjects like pop culture became serious focus of education. Departments and degrees sprung up around these subjects. Students spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to be taught to spend their time doing in depth analysis on The Simpsons.

  • In addition to tuition dollars the colleges were being given donations constantly. What corporation could do that without being shut down by the Feds? Did they use this money to pay their teachers? No. They claimed they had no money.

  • Tenure had no practical understanding of industry and yet they claimed to be preparing students for jobs in industry.

  • Creative problem solving was discouraged by many professors.

  • True diversity was not embraced no matter what they claimed. Only certain types of cultural experiences were acceptable: those being the ones that were in vogue that year; the ones that would result in grant money which, by the way, never went to paying teachers.

  • Students were encouraged by faculty and counselors to go to graduate school: they were in fact warned that their bachelor degrees would be worthless. Still they were charged hundreds of thousands of dollars for these bachelor degrees.

  • People come out of college only to discover they weren’t qualified to “do” anything, only now they were thousands of dollars in debt.

  • Practical skills were dismissed and looked down upon while impractical theories were extolled.

 

 

 

So, now the most wasteful, inept and parasitic organizations in our culture have decided they’re going to educate us all in sustainability. In fact they’re going to give out degrees in it. Wow—the rubber stamp of success from organizations who mismanage their resources so badly that they consistently need to contact their old clients to beg them for more money.

 

Really. Give me a break.

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