Be a philanthropist --of your own employer
I really am not sure it has become common practice to ask your employees for charitable donations but for the past week, I’ve been bombarded by ‘fun’ emails asking me to donate to the many worthy causes at the University of California, Irvine. Yesterday was tax day in the U.S., so perhaps my employer knew I was looking for a tax break on my salary, which might otherwise look like money laundering.
The many giving campaigns are also gamified: which sport can raise the most $$$? UC Irvine has an outstanding volleyball team, so they won in the fundraising competition.
In my article for Business Insider, I show how elite private institutions have completely been taken over by their billionaire donors’ priorities. It isn’t that my employer doesn’t have its billionaire benefactors, we just have fewer of them, which means the Development Office has to pass the hat at home.
It isn’t a joke that the late Richard Blum, UC Regent who invested in the for profit diploma mill, ITT Tech endowed on multiple UC Campuses Blum Centers for the Study of Poverty.
If my students seem resigned to a world turned upside and I seem a lonely angry person, I think it is because I came of age at the last moment of higher expectations regarding public institutions and public discourse. Are they wiser than I am? I’m asking myself that question very often these days as I am teaching a segment of a Genre Theory course on Romantic Comedy. We talked about raised expectations of marriage in the 1920s what with the rise of consumer society, and the mystification of marriage and romance that continued well into the Golden Age of the studio system.
It dawned on me that their expectations of romance and marriage are more realistic than mine were at their age. They are after all, the children of the financial crisis, the children of social media, the children already tired of the potty-mouthed transgressive revisionary romcoms of the aughts and the teens. They reminded me that by choosing to major in Film and Media Studies, they were already showing a romantic side, refusing the STEM transactionalism of their peers. A friend of mine told me that all his professor friends complain about their students. I am constantly surprised by mine.