Where I'm at now

I've been busy with school. Most of classes have been good so far, because I have been able to cross-post content created for class here. The class I just finished up was a operations management class. I felt checked out of it, because it was so focued on processes in manufacturing, and the closest I have ever come to manufacturing is fast food. The deliverables (and there were a lot) for that class were largely collaboerative responses to business cases, so they lack a lot of context. I felt that posting them wouldn't work as a stand-alone post. It also took me off my reading and responding (reviewing?) game. I have some books I want to talk about, but that's for the near future.
What I've started to do is sound out Directors of Graduate Studies for what I'm going to learn next after my MBA. My wife caught me looking at tuition rates and kind of freaked out, saying "Let's pay for this one first". I also got a promotion at work -- I now have a "Director of Finance" title that is getting to my head a bit.

Anyway, here's the image of myself I created for the DGS at Roosevelt University in Chicago:

I am a lifelong student. My original academic concentration was in English, which I graduated with a bachelor’s in 2004 from WVU and then for graduate school at Kansas State.  The financial crisis of 2008 (or however you want to date it), sparked my interest in the economy and the study of it. I looked into the PhD program at UIC years ago, but at the time I didn’t have the right foundations nor the means to persue it.

I fell into my current position after getting a certificate in Medical Coding and Billing at Devry, and then taking accounting and economic classes at local community colleges.

I am currently finishing up an MBA at Concordia in River Forest. I like the people I have been working with as my peers and my professors, but I feel it has been more a test of how much work I was willing to do an less an intellectual challenge. I undertook it as a practical matter. It helped me get to where I am and that might give me the means where I once did not have them.

I have an ultimate goal to have a PhD. I know that that too can just be a test of the wills. I am uncertain about what I would do with it, as I feels like a Quixotic goal. But it is still something I want to do. Having goals is nothing, though, if you don’t have plans.  I was content to let that simmer for a while. I also worried that it would not be applicable since my own reading in the subject has be outside of the orthodox sphere. I personally lean towards a Marxist reading and I’ll stick with the labor theory of value until I die.

So when I saw that a university local to me was one of the few nationally that support heterodox views, I was happy and wondering why I missed your school in my early researches that ended up fruitless.

Basically, then, I am writing because I have a couple of questions that I could not find on your website. The first is about the practicality of enrolling. I would most likely be only able to enroll part time. Is that precedent in your program. The second is about placement – how many of your students move on to PhD programs, especially ones that study outside of the mainstream.

Robert Putnam's "Our Kids": Compelling Argument Poorly Argued

There’s an epidemic out there. Poor kids these days don’t have a chance, and it’s getting worse.

Robert Putnam, with the help of an uncredited assistant (on the cover, at least), gathered storied of young adults and melded those stories of haves and have-nots with larger statistical trends to tell the story of how the educated class is ,moving away from the uneducated class. There are copious charts and graphs.

I really wanted to like this, since it covers a lot of the same ground as the recent Charles Muarry Book “Coming Apart,” and for ideological reasons I don’t want to read Muarry. The problem is that there’s no hook. The kid’s stories should be what grips you and pulls you into the text, but it doesn’t work. I think there’s too many so I can’t fully live their stories, or perhaps Putnam and company are better analytical thinkers than storytellers for generating pathos. Whatever it was, I was unengaged. It was good enough to finish, but it did not compel me to write marginalia. If you have to read this for a class, it will be readable but it might not pull you in if it is leisure time reading.

The Forces of Capital Are Strong: Micah Uetricht's "Strike for America"

I didn’t read this when it first came out. I figured that living in Chicago and participating in the rallies  and being on the CORE Facebook group gave me a sense of the strike that would be hard to replicate in a little book. I was wrong. Uetricht lays out the background and the events of the strike in the first half of the book in a depth that I was unfamiliar with. For that I’m grateful that I read it

                He then lays out the future of CTU and unionism as a whole, and I wish I didn’t read it now, because with Rauner in office in Illinois, the strike now feels like a high-water mark of what is possible in respect for the service professionals in Illinois – this book is a reminder of what could be with proper unity (and voter turnout) against the forces of “reform” that want to marketize every personal transaction.

                Structurally, there are some issues. Uetrucht likes to repeat scenes, which is odd, given the brevity of the book. There are multiple events given paragraph-length treatments more than once. Since It only takes a couple of hours to read, perhaps that should have been more heavily edited. There’s also three separate points where the reporting turns to first person. Since so much of it is not in first person, the inclusion of the authorial “I” is a bit jarring. I do get it though. I was at rallies for the teachers as a former teacher (nonunion though) myself. I felt solidarity with them, and the feeling around town was electric. I had my own red shirt that brought cheers and fives from strangers. It is that feeling of unity and solidarity that I wish we could feel all the time, and not just as teachers fight for respect from an elected government. In spite of those flaws, this is a worthy read.

"Cubed" by Nikil Saval: A Novel History of the Place of Work

This is one of those books that ended up getting a good bit of press because it was a novel way of looking at something that is an everyday thing.

The way that white collar workers do their work didn’t just happen that way, but it was a result of deliberate choices – from the architecture of the buildings that the work is done in to the furniture that the workers sit on. I hadn’t thought too deeply about it, thinking that the way things are was just a bit like the way things were, only with computers. I was wrong, and Saval tracks the changes, focused on the United States from the industrial revolution on. The white-collar worker has not been devoid of the standardization and alienation that the blue-collar worker had and rebelled against. The white-collar worker just never saw their white-collar chains; instead, they looked up, hoping to move up the ladder (no matter how false that metaphor is or was). 

The potential for striving has, writ large, been the barrier to class to recognition of the white-collar worker for generations. The lack of upward mobility except for into the white-collar ranks is what led to unionism and workers improving their lots. The myth of upward mobility in white-collar terms is a form of social control that is not readily seen.

Saval tracks this, and it makes me think if this has been a deliberate move. As production has been mechanized, there are fewer production workers and more support staff in ancillary roles to production. As more workers move out of production and the workforce is more and more professionalized, white-collar membership is the mass of workers. It is the cube that keeps them apart and alienated. Maybe it is a prison of sorts.

 Me?

I’m not part of this at all.

My office has a door.