Whenever someone gets reprimanded for the most trivial of reasons, there’s usually more to the story than what’s on the surface.

It might also be a typical case of someone disliked by his boss, who was just waiting for an excuse to slap him down, and this “terrorist thing” was the best thing he could come up with.

…because guns are indeed everywhere.

What a pity that any attempt to reduce the proliferation of weaponry in your country is seen as trampling on some sacred right. As a result of which, ordinary citizens end up living in continual fear of abuse of this weaponry. A fear which is entirely rational, because the weaponry does regularly get abused.

You have to understand about “adjunct-ization.” Most college classes are in courses which are sometimes taught in high school. In a large university, these kinds of classes are often taught by graduate students, at very low wages. There is a tendency to “ration” teaching assistantships, so that every graduate student gets a year or teaching employment, and thus, a chance to learn how to teach. The year I had a teaching assistantship (1989-90), I made, I believe, three thousand dollars and a tuition waiver (nominally $15,000, full-time equivalent). It was minimum wage, if that, considering the amount of work I actually did in preparation and grading. However, but if I had gone on for two or three years, teaching the same material to successive groups of freshmen, I would probably have become efficient enough to get through the work in a lot less time. People who get jobs at community colleges do just that, teaching the same freshman courses over and over.

What has been happening is that community colleges and teachers colleges, where there is no graduate program, have been insisting that such courses be taught by “adjuncts,” (adjunct professors) that is, instructors hired by the course, at essentially the same rate as graduate students. From a job which was rather better than teaching high school, and attracted people with better academic credentials, community college teaching is becoming a job which is considerable worse than teaching high school, and only attractive to people with other means of economic support. Here is an evocative description of the academic ghetto, teaching part-time at multiple schools, making about 15K for a 40-hr week, or 30K for an 80-hr week, no time to do research leading to publication, and no health insurance.

Mary Niederberger, “Health care law brings double dose of trouble for CCAC part-time profs,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, November 19, 2012

http://www.post-gazette.com/news/education/2012/11/19/Health-care-law-brings-double-dose-of-trouble-for-CCAC-part-time-profs/stories/201211190177

“Back office” tasks such as grading papers are being outsourced to India. It is only a matter of time before the colleges discover that a screen in front of the classroom, connected to someone in India, is much cheaper than American salaries.

One can assume that the Bergen Community College president, Kaye Walter, had tacit orders from above to fire ninety percent of the college faculty, and replace them with people who cannot afford to support a family. Obviously, as she is employed as a professional “hatchet-women,” having previously served in that capacity in Kansas, Florida, and Indiana, her relations with the unionized faculty are extremely bad. She was apparently trying to hijack the tenure committee, with a view to reneging on contracts of lifetime employment. She may have developed paranoid fears, or she may just have been looking for opportunities and pretexts to fire people. In practice, when you look at famous political paranoids, such as Tiberius Caesar, Elizabeth Tudor, Josef Stalin, and Richard Nixon, the two cases are not really separable.

The picture in question shows a little girl wearing a T-shirt which is obviously much too big for her. She is in fact dressed up in one of Daddy’s shirts, and is at liberty to raid Daddy’s wardrobe, take any shirt she fancies, and wear it as a dress. It could be that it is precisely this image of calm domesticity, supported by a civil-service salary, which is so threatening to the college president.