Something Posted on Social Media about Being a Jazz Instructor

[Paul]

"My goal in life is to be a jazz professor so I can teach other students
the skills to become jazz professors so they can teach other students
the skills to be jazz professors so they can teach other students the
skills to be jazz professors so they can teach other students the skills
to be jazz professors so they can teach other students the skills to be
jazz professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
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professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
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professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
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professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
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professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
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professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
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professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
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professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
professors so they can have a career."

Haha! :)

[Steven Bornfeld]

On 4/24/2017 2:26 PM, Paul wrote:
> "My goal in life is to be a jazz professor so I can teach other students
> the skills to become jazz professors so they can teach other students
> the skills to be jazz professors so they can teach other students the
> skills to be jazz professors so they can teach other students the skills
> to be jazz professors so they can teach other students the skills to be
> jazz professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
> professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz
> professors so they can teach other students the skills to be jazz

(snip)

It's not as if academia is the easy way to a long, secure career. Maybe
once, but...the stories I'm hearing lately are mostly not happy ones.

Steve

[David J. Littleboy]

"Steven Bornfeld" wrote in message news:odlgn2$fi7$1...@gioia.aioe.org...

Academia is a Ponzi scheme: a professor's job is to create more professors,
and each and every professor creates many many times the number of wannabe
professors, than the number of professorships s/he creates by croaking.

It was OK when the number of colleges was growing after WWII, but it soon
became a disaster and has remained one ever since.

It's the same story in both the humanites and the sciences.

--
David J. Littleboy
Tokyo, Japan

[Steven Bornfeld]

On 4/24/2017 4:02 PM, David J. Littleboy wrote:
>
> Academia is a Ponzi scheme: a professor's job is to create more
> professors, and each and every professor creates many many times the
> number of wannabe professors, than the number of professorships s/he
> creates by croaking.
>
> It was OK when the number of colleges was growing after WWII, but it
> soon became a disaster and has remained one ever since.
>
> It's the same story in both the humanites and the sciences.
>

Well, at least in the sciences and STEM fields there are fields other
than academia which are at least theoretically open. But for those who
WANT to stay in academia, yeah--by all accounts a disaster.

[Paul]

It's not just theory, but a reality.

The sciences and the STEM fields have all sorts of engineering,
bio-medical, information technology, etc. type jobs. This doesn't
guarantee a job for graduates, by any stretch of the imagination, but
it's a bigger pool than the music or art degrees will get you.

But luckily, you don't have to be a professor to teach music, and
plenty of people teach privately or with a school.

Having said all this....I would have LOVED to have gotten a
professorship teaching Jazz!

Those people are quite lucky!

:)

[Tim McNamara]

On Mon, 24 Apr 2017 14:38:28 -0400, Steven Bornfeld
<dentalt...@earthlink.net> wrote:
>
> It's not as if academia is the easy way to a long, secure career.
> Maybe once, but...the stories I'm hearing lately are mostly not happy
> ones.

Academia in an anti-education, anti-intellectual environment like the
United States is a profession guaranteed to put you in the line of fire
of someone. If you're a conservative the liberals will go after you, if
you're a liberal the conservatives will go after you and if you're a
moderate they'll *both* go after you.

[Steven Bornfeld]

Well, sure, but I'm not even talking about that. I'm talking about
adjuncts with no benefits, living on subsistence wages. IOW, like the
gig economy--certainly familiar to musicians.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bz4pK8UP4PM

Steve

[van]

It's a huge problem, and the latest statistics I've heard are that 75% of all college instructors are adjunct teaching.

My brother was 'juncting' for the last fifteen years with a PHD in Soc.,five or six books to his name, and many published articles in scholarly journals.

After wracking up 10K in debt on his credit card, he got a last minute call for a visiting professor gig, which lasted for three years, but that finishes this week, and he's going to be sleeping on my couch until he gets something going.

It is incredible that they pay slave wages to adjuncts, while they're charging
students from 50 to 100K a year for tuition.

Where does all the money go?

When I was in college, I told my composition teacher that I wanted to be a college prof. like him.

He said, "Are you kidding? We're getting paid less than the janitors at the school. Public school teachers are making twice what we're being paid, and they get more benefits than we have. I'm just doing this for the prestige I get when people ask me what I do!"

I gave that shit up, right then and there.

[Steven Bornfeld]

On 4/25/2017 6:56 PM, van wrote:
>
> It's a huge problem, and the latest statistics I've heard are that 75% of all college instructors are adjunct teaching.
>
> My brother was 'juncting' for the last fifteen years with a PHD in Soc.,five or six books to his name, and many published articles in scholarly journals.
>
> After wracking up 10K in debt on his credit card, he got a last minute call for a visiting professor gig, which lasted for three years, but that finishes

this week, and he's going to be sleeping on my couch until he gets
something going.
>
> It is incredible that they pay slave wages to adjuncts, while they're charging
> students from 50 to 100K a year for tuition.
>
> Where does all the money go?
>
> When I was in college, I told my composition teacher that I wanted to be a college prof. like him.
>
> He said, "Are you kidding? We're getting paid less than the janitors at the school. Public school teachers are making twice what we're being paid, and they

get more benefits than we have. I'm just doing this for the prestige I
get when people ask me what I do!"
>
> I gave that shit up, right then and there.
>

Sad, but lucky for you your professor had that talk with you when he
did. Most students probably wouldn't have listened.

[van]

Yeah, I just thought of it as a music related day gig back then, anyway. I was sick of academia; they forced you to write 12-tone music back then, which I still hate.

[Steven Bornfeld]

On 4/26/2017 2:39 PM, van wrote:
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Sad, but lucky for you your professor had that talk with you when he
>> did. Most students probably wouldn't have listened.
>
> Yeah, I just thought of it as a music related day gig back then, anyway. I was sick of academia; they forced you to write 12-tone music back then, which I still hate.
>

LOL! I tolerate it, more than like it. Sometimes!

[Tim McNamara]

On Tue, 25 Apr 2017 15:56:02 -0700 (PDT), van <sg...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Well, sure, but I'm not even talking about that. I'm talking about
>> adjuncts with no benefits, living on subsistence wages. IOW, like
>> the gig economy--certainly familiar to musicians.
>

> It's a huge problem, and the latest statistics I've heard are that 75%
> of all college instructors are adjunct teaching.
>
> My brother was 'juncting' for the last fifteen years with a PHD in
> Soc.,five or six books to his name, and many published articles in
> scholarly journals.
>
> After wracking up 10K in debt on his credit card, he got a last minute
> call for a visiting professor gig, which lasted for three years, but
> that finishes this week, and he's going to be sleeping on my couch
> until he gets something going.
>
> It is incredible that they pay slave wages to adjuncts, while they're
> charging students from 50 to 100K a year for tuition.
>
> Where does all the money go?

Interesting. Local newspaper article mentioning the University of
Minnesota indicated that the average professorial salary was $150,000 a
year. That wasn't broken out into tenured profs, visiting profs,
adjuncts, etc.- just "professors" so it's pretty nonspecific.

As for where the money goes, in a large university the number of
non-teaching staff probably outnumber the teaching staff 20:1. The
buildings are not cheap to build or to operate. And colleges and
universities feel under a lot of pressure to be technologically up to
date in order to attract quality students, so a lot of money goes to
things like internet-connected digital whiteboards instead of
chalkboards, lab equipment, etc. And then there are various other
amenities- the U of M has multiple fitness centers on the campuses, for
example.

College ain't just about classes. It wasn't even when I went to college
1977-81 and to grad school '86-88, but the concept of college is a much
bigger thing these days.

[Steven Bornfeld]

Of course. But when I was an undergrad in the early '70s, the City
University somehow could fund both tenure track positions AND free
tuition. Yes, it's true--we had no Division 1 football or basketball
programs. Priorities seem a bit off to me.

Steve

[David J. Littleboy]

"Steven Bornfeld" wrote:
>
>Of course. But when I was an undergrad in the early '70s, the City
>University somehow could fund both tenure track positions AND free tuition.

Back in those days, we MIT nerds held "tuition riots". We were just joking,
but somehow chanting "Twenty three hundred, Too damn much" seemed less
entitled and inane and insensitive than it does now in retrospect...

Still, it was a lot of money for my parents back then. And I was living at
home. Forty years later, tuition is 20 times that. Friggin insane.

> Yes, it's true--we had no Division 1 football or basketball programs.
> Priorities seem a bit off to me.

I thought that sports were actually money sources for a lot of colleges. If
you added in the value of keeping the alumni engaged and donating, I thought
it was in general a win.

[Steven Bornfeld]

Good question. And obviously public colleges often do have expensive
sports programs.
There must be some literature out there somewhere. Maybe I'll look if I
have some free time.

S

[Tim McNamara]

On Thu, 27 Apr 2017 09:47:49 -0400, Steven Bornfeld
<dentalt...@earthlink.net> wrote:
>
>
> Of course. But when I was an undergrad in the early '70s, the City
> University somehow could fund both tenure track positions AND free
> tuition. Yes, it's true--we had no Division 1 football or basketball
> programs. Priorities seem a bit off to me.

I agree.

What's changed- at least here- is that the legislature has become
vehemently opposed to people getting "something for nothing" like
affordable college tuition. Apparently the taxes most of us pay fall
into the category of "nothing."

There have been two types of funding cuts- the outright cuts and then
the silent cuts of just not keeping up with inflation- with the result
that public university tuition has skyrocketed (as has private college
tuition; there is a private college a mile from my house where one
year's tuition costs more than my BA and MA put together. How do people
send their kids to college nowadays? And why? The debt load practically
negates the economic advantage of going).

[Steven Bornfeld]

Well, our daughter is in U Mass now (actually "studying" abroad in
Spain), so we went through the exercise of looking at the financials 3
years ago. Not awful, even at out-of-state tuition. But she's our
only, and I think back to my parents--neither went to school past high
school--and they managed to send 3 kids to college and graduate
debt-free. I'm not sure that we could have done that, but we're
relatively well-off. (As far as dental school, my brother, who's on the
faculty at NYUCD tells me the tuition is $85K/year--JUST tuition.)
When we were looking, we saw articles about "efficiency" of
education--whether the high tuitions at private school paid off with
better earnings potential--and often they didn't. I wouldn't want that
calculus to make the decision, but it's hard to ignore.


Steve

S

[Tim McNamara]

Ultimately the cost of getting into or staying in the middle class in
America exceeds the financial rewards provided by being in the middle
class. There are a lot of factors and which ones you think are the most
important depend on your political philosophical affiliation.

[Steven Bornfeld]

On 4/30/2017 10:56 PM, Tim McNamara wrote:
>
> Ultimately the cost of getting into or staying in the middle class in
> America exceeds the financial rewards provided by being in the middle
> class. There are a lot of factors and which ones you think are the most
> important depend on your political philosophical affiliation.
>

That's not something we're used to in this country--downward social
mobility.

[Gerry]

We'll acclimate. Americans are good at acclimatig to change. Or
"rolling over for the wealthy" if you prefer.

[Tim McNamara]

True, and of course as I reread it I see I am drastically overstating
the case. What I wrote is truer for the bottom 1/4 of the middle class
and less true for the upper 1/4. "Middle Class" is an ambiguously
defined notion and arguably there are a fair number of people on the
upper and lower ends of that economic spectrum that incorrectly identify
as "middle class." Some are really lower class, some are really upper
class.

But in addition to the economics, "middle class" also suggest a set of
values, lifestyle, etc. For example, I have friends who look pretty
classically middle class: two working parents, three children, medium
sized house in a medium tier suburb. But both parents are doctors and
their annual household income is probably over $250,000- well out of the
middle class despite looking very much like a middle class family in all
other respects.

Where I live, a "middle class" lifestyle for a family of five would take
a household income of about $125,000 a year acording to an economic
analysis published a couple of years ago. In some other area, that
might be $75,000 or it might be $200,000 (say, Mississippi versus
Manhattan).

However, the cost of college is now astonishing to me; spending $200,000
on a 4 year degree has got to be unsupportable for a lot of otherwise
deserving potential students. One of the local movements has been
buying a house for the student to live in; they rent it out to friends
to cover the house payment; after graduation they can continue to rent
it out or sell it and use the proceeds to pay down their student debt.
When my wife and I went to college (1977-81) our parents were able to
pay for it without incurring debt- it was tight for them, to be sure,
but they were able to do so. Few families can do that now, but then it
was the norm for most of my classmates. In 1986 I went to grauate
school and between tuition, housing, etc., I ended up wth $10,000 in
student loans (at 7% interest...). But- getting a BA quadrupled my
income (through getting non-menial jobs) and getting an MA doubled my
income again. I don't know if that sort of benefit still happens, maybe
it does.

Flip side- a coworkers son, just out of college, got his first job with
a starting salary of $60,000. LOL! My first job out of college was
$12,000! Corrected for inflation, his salary is about double what I was
making. Good for him (but it's more than his dad makes...).

[Steven Bornfeld]

I'm trying to stop reading some of the medical mailing lists (like
KevinMD). To read the comments, you'd think 90% of doctors are
right-wingers of the "I blame Obama" variety.
And yet, I probably don't have to tell you (if you participate in any
insurance panels) that reimbursement rates relatively have gotten
progressively worse over time, so much of the grumbling is
understandable (if not justified).
It is comforting to hear that a kid can still get a decent job out of
college--mine is finishing her junior year (in Spain) now.

[Steven Bornfeld]

What was that Eddie Murphy line about the prisoner?
"Bend Over!!"
"Pleased to meet you, Mr. Dover!"

[Gerry]

Stand up!
Please to meet you Mr. Dup!

[Tim McNamara]

On Tue, 2 May 2017 16:01:42 -0400, Steven Bornfeld
<dentalt...@earthlink.net> wrote:
>
> I'm trying to stop reading some of the medical mailing lists (like
> KevinMD). To read the comments, you'd think 90% of doctors are
> right-wingers of the "I blame Obama" variety.

Well, many are. Doctors- especially expensive specialists- tend to be
more towards the conservative end of the spectrum IME. Generalists,
family practitioners, internists, etc., seem to tend to be mroe liberal.
Of course, they are making 1/2 of what a radiologist, cardiac surgeon,
ortho surgeon, etc. makes.

> And yet, I probably don't have to tell you (if you participate in any
> insurance panels) that reimbursement rates relatively have gotten
> progressively worse over time, so much of the grumbling is
> understandable (if not justified).

Well, the increases in reimbursement for psychologists over the 27 years
I have been in practice has not kept up with inflation, let alone with
the leaping costs of doing business. Once the office rent, EHR license
fee, phones, internet access, equipment, etc., are paid for the
clinician can readily end up losing money.

I make twice what I made in 1991, but corrected for inflation that's a
bit better than a break-even (what, about 14%, so about a 0.5% raise per
year over my career). And thats way, way better than at least half of
Americans have seenin the same time frame. Many of us are earnign
equivalently less than we made in 1991 or 1968- the median income has
actually fallen since then. The only thing preventing large scale riots
is the ease with which one can get and use a credit card to live beyond
one's means. Of course, them chickens will come home to roost in
another 15 years when the baby boomers are mostly retired and can't
repay their debt (especially the third of us that have zero retirement
savings).

Insurance companies tend to like large practices as provders, believing
that there is a better return for the fees they pay; they may be right,
as the insurance insdustry is very actuary-driven. They parse those
numbers very carefully. There is an interesting trend towards
micro-practices that I have been reading about- a single provider with a
tiny office and very low overhead, seeing a small caseload. By
minimizing costs, it's easier to make a decent living without having to
see 30 patients a day five days a week.

> It is comforting to hear that a kid can still get a decent job out of
> college--mine is finishing her junior year (in Spain) now.

Well, it matters what major they pick. If it's a "supersize major" (as
in they will professionally be asking customers if they want to
"supersize" those fries an soda), then college may not pay off...