Dr. Lester K. Spence

Important tidbits in a growing story:

•  College endowments drop like a rock.
• In earlier news, NPR decides to drop News and Notes.
• Newspapers like the Detroit Free Press go virtual, while other newspapers won’t survive 2009.
• Book publishers have slashed their budgets. 

Now this may sound like a doom and gloom story. But it isn’t…necessarily. I choose these stories because they point to the growing reality that “cultural creatives” (writers, artists, musicians, intellectuals, journalists) like the institutions that sponsor them may need to rethink the way they work. With colleges and universities losing their endowments more and more graduate students will need to go outside of the academy for work. People on the tenure track will be placed in a much more tenuous position–assuming that tenure continues to exist. If the days of big advances are gone, then writers are going to have to figure out some other way to make ends meet.

And unlike the New Deal, when FDR created programs for artists…I’m not sure Obama has anything like this coming.

There are a whole set of conversations about the future of publishing, the future of the academy, the future of the music business. Black intellectuals haven’t been significant voices here.

We should be…because our futures are on the line as well, even as our future IS online. For me what I’ve had to realize over the past year is that the model with which we train graduate students, the model we pursue as assistant, associate, full professors, no longer works. And will NOT work. We need to be much more supple, much more entrepreneurial, and much more fluid in the types of questions we ask, the types of projects we undertake, the types of venues we pursue them in.

As an aside by the time you read this I should be on the road to Detroit, for a combination of pleasure (family), and business (collecting data for my next book project).

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Historians (rightly) rap Obama, arguing his stimulus package is weak.

As students of American history, we are heartened by your commitment to a jobs stimulus program inspired by the New Deal and aimed at helping “Main Street.” We firmly believe that such a strategy not only helps the greatest number in our communities but goes a long way toward correcting longstanding national problems.

For all our admiration of FDR’s reform efforts, we must also point out that the New Deal’s jobs initiative was overwhelmingly directed toward skilled male and mainly white workers. This was a mistake in the 1930s, and it would be a far greater mistake in the 21st century economy, when so many families depend on women’s wages and when our nation is even more racially diverse.

We all know that our country’s infrastructure is literally rusting away. But our social infrastructure is equally important to a vibrant economy and livable society, and it too is crumbling. Investment in education and jobs in health and care work shore up our national welfare as well as our current and future productivity. Revitalizing the economy will require better and more widespread access to education to foster creative approaches and popular participation in responding to the many challenges we face. 

More here. I haven’t chimed in on the Rick Warren deal, but taken in sum I’m reminded of something I first heard from my wife. When someone shows you who they are, believe them. But instead of sitting on the sidelines, do something. 

Again, thanks go to Buster.

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There were riots in Greece last week just four years after Athens hosted the Olympics (and several months after the media started to ask was it worth it? The proximate cause? An incident of police brutality after clashes between police and protesters left one 15-year old teenager dead. 

But of course the roots go much deeper.

I asked yesterday for readers to connect the dots for me.

Today I do the connecting.

Bringing together youths in their early twenties struggling to survive amid mass youth unemployment and schoolchildren swotting for highly competitive university exams that may not ultimately help them in a treacherous jobs market, the events of the past week could be called the first credit-crunch riots. There have been smaller-scale sympathy attacks from Moscow to Copenhagen, and economists say countries with similarly high youth unemployment problems such as Spain and Italy should prepare for unrest.

“I’ve seen the future and it will be.” 

For an interesting meta-analysis, check out Buster, bout to be added to the RSS feed.

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Check out the following press release from Good Jobs First:

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Detroit is the modern city. What we think of when we think of the modern urban condition (from relying on automobiles and freeways to drive, from using cities to house labor for factories, to stereotypes of crime and urban dysfunction) all happened in Detroit first. So goes Detroit, so goes urban America (and arguably the urban West/North). 

With that said, two stories of interest.

Detroit as a city was built for over 2 million people. Now less than 900,000 live within her borders. Over 30% of her land is unused. No wonder coyotes have been spotted roaming the city. Take a look at how Detroit compares to other major cities. Manhattan has 1.6 times as many residents in less than half of the space. Now we can look at this through the neoliberal lens and talk about waste and inefficiency…in fact this is the normal urban narrative right? Detroit is empty because it is dangerous, corrupt even. And with the economy the way it is, Detroiters able to actually sell their house at a profit, or at least at a mild loss, would do best to actually pick up stakes and leave.

I understand this viewpoint, but don’t take it myself. In fact I think it represents an opportunity to think about the city, and about cities in new and vibrant ways.

If you potentially had 89 square miles of empty land to use to serve the needs of the Detroit population, what would you use it for? What could you use it for?

…….

The second story?

The Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News have decided to go virtual. They will publish everyday but only deliver to homes on Thursday, Friday, and Sunday. Further they will devote much more of their resources to delivering news through their webpages. Hits on their webpage hover around 4 million per day, while their newspaper readership has declined. Their profits are still decent, but the costs of printing are becoming prohibitive. 

This is another cost-cutting measure that hamstrings a whole set of workers. Not only are paperboys/girls out of luck, but also out of luck are the distributors they work for. And then there are the craftsmen and women who work the printing machines. 

On the other hand though this theoretically leads to more innovative ways to deliver news. I shot some video over the holidays in Detroit with the thought of making a mini-documentary of sorts, and was approached about possibly letting the Free Press use some of it. 

Detroit as we know it is dead. But rather than performing an autopsy, we should await the new birth. What does the spirit of the twentieth century come back as?

The spirit of the twenty-first.

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Roland Fryer has been working on a program that pays children for academic success for a while now, and its been rolled out in Chicago, New York City, and Washington D.C. even though research argues that it does little to nothing to reduce the achievement gap. For all of the talk about black public intellectuals such as Cornel West, I don’t think there is a single black public intellectual who has had more of an effect on public policy. When Fryer jokes that economy studies and rationalizes behavior in this and all known universes he lays out the central premise of neoliberal governmentality.

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Early last week at around the same time that my neighbor fell asleep at the wheel, taking out my mailbox in the process (about 1:30am), I got an email from a friend in Europe. 

News and Notes had been cancelled.

I’ve been a fan of NPR now going back over twenty years. To say I believe in public radio is an understatement. When “smooth jazz” took over the airwaves in Detroit, stifling Miles Davis and John Coltrane in favor of Najee and Kenny G., the only place I could hear bebop, cool, and big band was NPR. When I wanted to hear hard-hitting interviews I’d either listen to Diane Rehm or to Terry Gross. And when I entered the ranks of the gainfully employed, my drive home was always accompanied by All Things Considered.

But there was still something missing. An entire series of voices I felt I wasn’t hearing.

Fast forward. Tavis Smiley creates the black equivalent of a media juggernaut (sad commentary on the state of black media when we think of what Smiley accomplished in those terms). And he comes up with the brilliant idea of expanding NPR’s audience. 

News and Notes was born. Because he felt NPR wasn’t willing to give him the support needed to grow NPR as a brand in black urban communities, he left and was replaced by Ed Gordon. 

And this is when they put me on. No. When Farai put me on. I met Farai through her (equally powerful, equally compassionate) sister. And in talking with Farai she told me that she was working on something that she wanted me to be down with. 

I’d gotten wise enough at that point to smile and graciously say “thanks for thinking of me”, while not putting much stock in it. 

Next thing I know I’m getting a phone call from NPR. And then regularly doing bits on News and Notes, and then later, Tell Me More. Not only was I finally hearing the voices I was missing, I was one of the voices. There are more people who have the integrity to actually speak the truth and WORK the truth they speak…but I only know a few. Farai is one of them.  

In writing about the change, NPR execs focused on the dollars and cents. Whereas a couple of years ago they were 2 million in the red, that figure has jumped to 23 million. And given that a significant chunk of their money comes from corporate donors and philanthropists who have their money in the stock market, it should come as no surprise that they’ve got to make very difficult programming decisions in order to stay on the air. (As an aside this is an important reason why public radio should be PUBLIC radio rather than privately funded radio but I digress.) 

But it’s unfortunate (to say the least) that a show like News and Notes became a casualty. Sounds a bit like the “last hired first fired” line that many of us are used to. 

We’ll see Farai, and though they work behind the scenes, her staff again soon. Here’s hoping it will be VERY soon.

Thank you Farai.

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GM doesn’t have enough money to go through the year. Chrysler is for all intents and purposes a dead man walking. Ford has enough, but if the other two go out, then who knows?

In following the talk about the bailout I hear a lot more resentment in this case than I did with the financiers. Even though they’re asking for far less money. Now part of this is because folks are rightly feeling they got fleeced with the financier bailout. So perhaps if GM got to Congress first we’d be talking about financier failure.

But I don’t think so.

People “know” much more about making cars than they do about making financial “products” (placed in quotes because this is a linguistic wave of hands…exotic mortgages aren’t “products” they are SERVICES). So when Paulson says he wants money without strings and without oversight, on some level people think that there is a level of knowledge required to handle the financial industry that they (and most they know) simply do not have. 

The auto industry on the other hand? Everyone “knows” how cars are made and how the line works.

And with this “knowledge” comes resentment of unionized blue-collar workers who are protected from competition even though they are lazy and shiftless. Working 1 real hour for every 8 they put in. And making more money because of the union than the market can carry. When the GOP seizes this opportunity to in effect gut the UAW, people are with it.

Let the market work.

Make the workers compete for their value.

Bring their salaries down.

This knowledge is intimate. Everyone knows someone who works for the auto industry. And we’ve all pretty much had the assembly line ethos poured into our heads for the last fifty years. But this knowledge is deeply tainted. Looking at the current situation salaries have already been cut. Union workers are taking buyouts and are then replaced by workers who are paid less and don’t have benefits. The foreign automakers have significant state subsidies that pad their profits significantly. Now this last component is important, because the automotive companies could’ve had the same deal had they pushed for national health insurance. In fact if they pushed for it NOW they wouldn’t be in the straits they are.

(On top of that, speaking as someone with blue-collar experience, those jobs are some of the hardest in the country.)

Our intimate “knowledge” here leads us to a set of naturally regressive conclusions. In effect GM is being treated like welfare recipients are treated. And I have to admit I was happy that the auto execs were raked over the coals for flying (in separate jets no less) into D.C. But just like folks “knowledge” about welfare and poverty, our “knowledge” about the auto industry is tainted. The end result is that our attitudes about the automotive industry are driven by some of the same regressive forces that drive our attitudes about welfare.

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We hit the Illinois Pay-for-Play scandal hard on the Barbershop. For me it was the most ghetto version of the politics as business model that we’ve been infected with at least since the Reagan era. “Running the city like a business”, the idea of “hiring” a political official (as opposed to electing him/her), asking for loot for a political office? All on the same continuum to me.

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