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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

> If Thea had a tenure-track job and access to proper health insurance to be appropriately diagnosed, she might still be alive, they said.

This is a bizarre take-away from this story. What about all the people who weren't fortunate enough to attend Columbia University and live a life of learning? Shouldn't they be able to get a check-up that would have caught fluid build-up in their lungs?

This story could've been written about an Uber or Lyft driver, and the take-away would have been the same: America needs a better health-insurance story for people who aren't poor, but who don't have consistent full-time work. The adjunct angle just adds an ugly layer of classism to that point. ("Oh, this person had a degree from Columbia, she shouldn't have faced the same struggles as an Uber driver.") Everyone should be able to get a regular checkup, regardless of their job. Beyond that, if the market values historians similarly to Uber drivers, well, so be it.

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The article is not arguing against universal health care, it is arguing against the terrible state of employment for university teachers. You know, it is possible for more than one thing to be wrong in society at once.

The implicit premise of the article is that university professors shouldn’t be brushing up against the floor of society. That’s odious. The societal baseline must be adequate, and the tragedy here is that it’s not. But nobody is intrinsically entitled to a better life than the baseline just because of their education.

My takeaway is that most people assume a university professor never "brushes up against the floor of society" (as you put it).

This article is good for enlightening people that this is far from the case.

It is definitely bad for university teaching, and hence the students who pay big bucks to attend, if their teachers are in such a bad situation.

Whataboutism, two wrongs don't make a right.

The story is abut inhumane working conditions, inadequate compensation, and access, literally, to the necessties of life, via systemic faiure.

The local failure is on Columbia University.

The broader failure is not.

It's not clear to me what Columbia did wrong. She got a PhD there, likely for free, and after graduation was able to secure a tenure track job at a decent university. She was set up pretty well at that point.

The issues that came after that point seem to have very little to do with Columbia.

More CCNY than Columbia, perhaps, but institutional outsourcing of stress and risk for inadequate pay, security, and healthcare is a huge part of the problem.

And not just for academics, though as a group they have distinctive challenges.

The story is a call for middle class welfare: paying an educated, relatively privileged group more than their market value—and more than what we deem the societal minimum—so they can have a higher standard of living than say food service workers and retail. (Who likely would consider the “inhuman” working conditions of being an adjunct professor quite a step up.) That’s not moral. Nothing about having an advanced degree entitles you to a better life than people without one.

Let me suggest an alternate summary: The story is a call for welfare.

Have you read your Marx?

No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, clothe, and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed, and lodged.

Or:

It may be said that of this hard lot no one has any reason to complain, because it befalls those only who are outstripped by others, from inferiority of energy or of prudence. This, even were it true, would be a very small alleviation of the evil. If some Nero or Domitian were to require a hundred persons to run a race for their lives, on condition that the fifty or twenty who came in hindmost should be put to death, it would not be any diminution of the injustice that the strongest or nimblest would, except through some untoward accident, be certain to escape. The misery and the crime would be that any were put to death at all. So in the economy of society; if there be any who suffer physical privation or moral degradation, whose bodily necessities are either not satisfied or satisfied in a manner which only brutish creatures can be content with, this, though not necessarily the crime of society, is pro tanto a failure of the social arrangements.

Trick question -- Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill, respectively.

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_I/...

https://archive.org/stream/chaptersonsocial00mill#page/264/m...

Those quotes express the view that there should be a minimum standard that is adequate. Which I agree with. What I disagree with is the idea that being a professor entitles you to something higher than that minimum standard, which is the premise of the article.

Does your minimum standard fall above or below the necessities of life?

I don't see the conditions being described in. the article (or many others of adjunct or even full-time professors) as extraordinary. There's another passage in Smith discussing the constituents of pay I recommend considering.

What do you earn? Is this above that minimum standard?

What of college football coaches? Or VC?

Why should colleges (or any other enterprise) be charities paid for by the sacrifices, and lives, of instructors or workers?

Please keep the 'whataboutism' cliché off HN. At this point it adds no information and is just a form of name-calling, so therefore against the site guidelines.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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