Para Calificar, Jams

Bicycle Accident Saga 2: Administration Failure

Because both instances of colliding with a car, while riding my bicycle, occurred while I was within blocks of or actually on the campus of the university that I attend, I necessarily received contact with a Dean from Student Affairs. These two interactions were both incredibly frustrating and also instances wherein I enjoyed another of the indispensable pleasures of graduate school, administrative condescension.


After discussing the accident in May with a lawyer, he determined that even if I was partially liable for the accident (which you might recall I can't remember due to a concussion I received from the experience) the University's negligence (enumerated in an e-mail I sent below) certainly contributed to the accident. I made contact with this Dean in the hopes that I might just wrangle some funds for replacing my bike. I made several allusive comments though no specific demands in hopes that the woman from Student Affairs might catch one, suggesting how much I was put out by the issue and the ways in which that is a rather dangerous intersection. I found she was either willfully blind to these appeals as should be her role as an administrator for a University that is run like a corporation or prone to being a dense person. 


She treated our interaction as if I needed my fears, about the future of my funding in the department and the problems that might ensue from delays in my work for my status in the department, to be assuaged, rather than just giving me some help with my now twice broken central means of transportation. 


Here is a letter I wrote to her about my 1st bicycle issue:

To Whom It May Concern:
It has been almost two months since my accident and I haven’t received any correspondence from you about the possibilities of helping me following the collision that occurred on ______’s campus between myself, my bicycle, and another student in a car. I have to say I am more than a little disappointed in _______’s tepid response to the collision. Students are more likely to hear about undergraduates being mugged eight miles from campus than a student being run down by a car feet from a _____ facility building.

I am also disappointed in the fact that the core problems have not been addressed. Looking at the accident scene over the past two months there has been no posted speed limit, no signs to warn drivers and cyclists about a single-lane two-way street, no mirror installed to give drivers turning onto _______ Road a view of what might be coming the opposite direction, and only the occasional patrol car monitoring the spot. This is a real problem because cyclists use that route constantly from the _____ Trail in order to head toward Squirrel Hill, South Oakland, etc. I wouldn’t be surprised if this happened again.
The drafting of my dissertation prospectus has been delayed by a month due to repercussions from the concussion I received during the collision. After consultation with a concussion specialist I was advised to take all tasks slowly, and that I would be easily fatigued by many every day activities. What I discovered that after an hour or reading, drafting, or focusing I became so tired that I needed to sleep in order to continue. This severely slowed my progress to the goal of completing my dissertation prospectus by the end of the summer. 

Moreover, my central means of transportation, my bicycle, in which I invested several hundred of dollars over the course of years is rendered unusable from the accident. As a graduate student in the humanities I will not be able to afford to replace my bicycle for some time. 

Given the lack of signs, mirrors, warnings, or posted speed limits and little correspondence from the university I don’t believe _________ has lived up to its responsibility with regard to the collision on May 26^th.
Sincerely,
SM

The second time a car decided to break the law and hit me, just this past September, this same Dean called me on the phone, giggling, with the words, "I thought to myself, 'lighting does not strike twice!'" coming out of her mouth. I thought to myself, "It does when your incompetent campus police and the city police do not do their job and protect non-drivers, and the campus refuses to protect bicyclists properly." 


The more I think about this interaction the more it fills me with rage, particularly when I read the Washington Monthly Article "Administrators Ate My Tuition." 


Being part of a department that tends to politicize academic work and simultaneously discusses the ways in which academic work is labor I was accustomed to think in these terms about the dilemmas facing universities and the various employees at the university. But I think in the state I was in reading these statistics and this assessment enraged me even more. 


Essentially the article attributes the ballooning tuition rates in the United States to the self-propagating efforts of various administrative bodies who bloat their ranks in order to garner prestige for their departments. For example:

between 1947 and 1995 (the last year for which the relevant data was published), administrative costs increased from barely 9 percent to nearly 15 percent of college and university budgets. More recent data, though not strictly comparable, follows a similar pattern. During this same time period, stated in constant dollars, overall university spending increased 148 percent. Instructional spending increased only 128 percent, 20 points less than the overall rate of spending increase. Administrative spending, though, increased by a whopping 235 percent.

Not to mention

Students of bureaucracy have frequently observed that administrators have a strong incentive to maximize the power and prestige of whatever office they hold by working to increase its staff and budget. To justify such increases, they often seek to capture functions currently performed by others or invent new functions for themselves that might or might not further the organization’s main mission.

Such behavior is common on today’s campuses. At one school, an inventive group of administrators created the “Committee on Traditions,” whose mission seemed to be the identification and restoration of forgotten university traditions or, failing that, the creation of new traditions. Another group of deans constituted themselves as the “War Zones Task Force.” This group recruited staffers, held many meetings, and prepared a number of reports whose upshot seemed to be that students should be discouraged from traveling to war zones, unless, of course, their home was in a war zone. But perhaps the expansion of university bureaucracies is best illustrated by an ad placed by a Colorado school, which sought a “Coordinator of College Liaisons.” Depending on how you read it, this is either a ridiculous example of bureaucratic layering or an intrusion into an area of student life that hardly requires administrative assistance. 

These problems would not be as galling had I not just experienced the evasive non-help of the administrator in question, who pretended to believe that I needed someone to vent to more than someone who might actually remunerate me as the result of this corporatized university's negligence to properly monitor traffic and provides signs and aid to visibility where there clearly was none.

Planned Palestinian City, Argument for Sovereignty?

Poverty Statistics Hitting News Outlets, 1 in 15 Americans Affected by Poverty

From The Skanner:

"About 20.5 million Americans, or 6.7 percent of the U.S. population, make up the poorest poor, defined as those at 50 percent or less of the official poverty level. Those living in deep poverty represent nearly half of the 46.2 million people scraping by below the poverty line. In 2010, the poorest poor meant an income of $5,570 or less for an individual and $11,157 for a family of four.That 6.7 percent share is the highest in the 35 years that the Census Bureau has maintained such records, surpassing previous highs in 2009 and 1993 of just over 6 percent."

They demonstrate the shifting compositions of urban poverty in the United States, with a recognition of undocumented and increasing Latino poverty:

"The new supplemental poverty measure for the first time will take into account non-cash aid such as tax credits and food stamps, but also additional everyday costs such as commuting and medical care. Official poverty figures released in September only take into account income before tax deductions.Based on newly released estimates for 2009, the new measure will show a significant jump in overall poverty. Poverty for Americans 65 and older is on track to nearly double after factoring in rising out-of-pocket medical expenses, from 9 percent to over 15 percent. Poverty increases are also anticipated for the working-age population because of commuting and child-care costs, while child poverty will dip partly due to the positive effect of food stamps.For the first time, the share of Hispanics living in poverty is expected to surpass that of African-Americans based on the new measure, reflecting in part the lower participation of immigrants and non-English speakers in government aid programs such as housing and food stamps. The 2009 census estimates show 27.6 percent of all Hispanics living in poverty, compared with 23.4 percent for blacks."

Thoughts on Punk and Race, from the Editors of White Riot

In an interview with souciant.com:

"MT: I think the agental moment is very important. But one thing that occurred to me just now is that there are complex networks of privilege informing that agency as well. Particularly when you think about black punks, for instance. “Punk” is something they are hailed as, a homophobic slur. And so I wouldn’t want to make it seem too hunky dory — “I can identify as punk and everything’s great!” — because “punk” is very a complicated term that people in various margins of racial outsiderness have to negotiate, especially when it does take on that poisonous valence.

SD: The thing is, a lot of punks of color will talk about the fact that as they slipped their given identity and took on the mantle of punk, they’d get crap from people asking, essentially, “What, are you trying to be white?” So punk is identified as white and therefore it becomes very complicated for them. Here’s this way that through their agency they can adopt a race-less identity — at least that’s the ideal — which is, “I’m punk,” yet it is seen both by people from their own ethnicity and, unfortunately, white punks as being white. And that gives them a lot of anxiety. Now what James Spooner has done with Afro-punk and a lot of the folks in the Race Riot zine."

(White Riot, out on Verso).

October 30th, 1950; Puerto Rico's Nationalist uprising

Text from Nothing to Be Gained Here:

"On October 30th of 1950 a Puerto Rican woman by the name of Blanca Canales led an uprising in the mountain town of Jayuya. Under her leadership the Nationalists took Jayuya and Blanca Canales declared Puerto Rico a free republic. At the same time in the town of Utado Nationalists were fighting the US National Guard and other Nationalists were attacking “La Forteleza” the governors mansion in San Juan and the Federal Court House in Old San Juan.

Blanca Canales and the Nationalists were successful in holding Jayuya for three days until the US military bombed them from the air and sent in ground troops

[...]

The Nationalists may have failed to free Puerto Rico but they succeeded in keeping the US from hiding it’s colonial possession with semantic Orwellian double speak like “Free Associated State”… The Nationalists succeeded in making it be known all over the world that Puerto Rico wanted to be free and was willing to fight to do so"

(image of National Guard invading Jayuya)

2nd Accident, Hateful Insurance Companies

After being hit by a car earlier this summer I was still resolved to commute around Pittsburgh once the fog of the concussion lifted and I had the opportunity to adjust and build up a spare bicycle I had purchased from a friend a year before. 


Needless to say the accident before made me much more careful of how I conduct myself on the road, the risks I'm willing to take, and the attention I pay to others on the road. 


On one such careful commutes to school from my home I was sitting at a red light in a very busy intersection (actually approximately 2 blocks from the previous accident) and preparing to cross. This red light is particular because it is on a very busy road that is also between two university campuses. In order to allow pedestrians the ability to cross said road without having the potential threat of being struck by a turning vehicle the pedestrian walk sign lights up 10 seconds before the green light for vehicles headed in the same direction. 


At one such moment, sitting at the red light, I looked at each light in turn making sure all reds were illuminated as with the pedestrian light. I saw no vehicles in the intersection. I started pedaling into the intersection. I hear the roar of acceleration coming from my left turning just in time to see a red Suburban slamming into me and the tanned, chubby, blonde-hair ringed face of the driver staring down at me as she attempted to brake. She failed to run me over, and I looked up at her weepy face and yelled, "not another time this fucking year!" I limped to the corner dragging my bent (steel frame bicycle) behind me.


The driver parked and ran up to me weeping and shrieking to see if I was ok. Other drivers and bicyclists stopped and circled around checking on me, calling the police, and helping get the driver's insurance information. The Pittsburgh police did their usual bang up job by insisting that they were not going to write a report, nor were they going to issue the driver a citation for running the red light and hitting me. They were instead much more interested on whether or not the driver who was helping me was properly respecting their authority. (This is no shock as the Pittsburgh police are known to have a hefty history of violating resident's constitutional rights) 


The driver continued to hyperventilate and since I didn't detect immediately any broken bones and any real emergency, I was surprisingly lucky, I limped to my office to call the driver's insurance company and start the claim process. During the call I notice my left ankle swelling more and more, turning blue. The student health center determined that I had no significant bone breaking, mostly soft tissue damage, and eventually an injured tendon. 


Although I know I probably could have sued this woman's insurance company I didn't really have the time and emotional energy to get into a legal battle. So I gave the insurance company my statement expecting at least some sort of minimal recompense besides the medical costs associated with the accident. That was a semi-delusional attitude, as I later learned, moreover, NEVER GIVE AN INSURANCE COMPANY A STATEMENT IF YOU EXPECT THEM TO GIVE YOU A DECENT RECOMPENSE FOR THE SHIT YOU GO THROUGH, OR DESTROYED PROPERTY. First, speak with a lawyer, that is if you are certain you are not at fault. 


The insurance company gave me the run around offering me at the end around $500 for future medical costs, and for my destroyed bike because the frame was older. Little did they know or care was that the frame was a very sturdy 30 year-old frame which I had augmented with newer parts. I had to argue with them and suggested a much higher amount of a few thousand dollars. After hearing my objections they tacked on another couple of hundred dollars which frustrated me, and I started to object to which the agent, replied by insulting me. She insisted, "I know you got in another accident earlier this year and this makes me wonder..." Because I didn't want to hear the bullshit insurance company logic that dictated this incredibly soft-voiced, soprano midwestern woman I suggested that I would seek legal action and then hung up. I was in a rage for hours following that interaction, the notion that I would just liberally ride my bicycle in the way of cars only to wheedle money out of insurance companies had to be the largest deposit of feces I had ever been asked to ingest. Why the fuck, I thought, as a PhD student just recovered from a concussion would I ever risk my brain like that again? For a few hundred bucks? That is insane.


In the end I gave in. I have a prospectus to write, mounds of grading, and at the time a controversial argument to write for a panic inducing bilingual conference. I took the money so that I could eventually get a new bicycle and get on with my life and not endure anymore of the insults leveled at me by this woman, who for a second, almost got me to question my recollection of the collision itself. Fuck insurance companies. 


(Part 2, coming shortly, discusses the uselessness of university administrators in cases like these).