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If you have been even peripherally involved in higher education in the United States, then you've heard of Title IX. But if you haven't, here's the U.S. government's blurb:
Title IX is most famous for requiring equal athletic opportunities for men and women, without regard for whether this makes (among other things) any financial sense at all. But Title IX also imposes a variety of reporting requirements on college and university faculty and staff, such that essentially every campus has a Title IX Coordinator (or similar), and many campuses maintain entire offices of Title IX administrative staff. Do they do real, important work? I would argue virtually never--these are bullshit jobs par excellence--with one enormous caveat: they serve as a lightning rod for both civil liability and federal intervention.
(Well isn't that real and important, then? Yes, yes, it's a fair point. But I still think jobs that exist solely to push unnecessary government paperwork are inescapably bullshit jobs. Hiring government actors--executive and judicial--to punish universities for failing to meet politically-imposed quotas on social engineering goals, so that universities must hire administrators to give themselves cover, is the very picture of government stimulating the economy by paying one group of people to dig holes, and another group to follow behind them, filling the holes back up again. But this is not the point of my post.)
The Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights fields several thousand sex discrimination complaints every year. Less than 10,000, but close--the DoE's OCR fielded a record 9,498 complaints last year. But that's not the headline.
Here's the headline:
You probably read that right.* More than 77% of all sex discrimination complaints filed with the OCR are filed by a single person, at a rate of about 20 complaints per day--and this same individual was responsible for a similar number and percentage of complaints in 2016, and possibly other years as well. Of this person, the office says:
* I reserve the right to rapidly backtrack my commentary if it turns out that this "single person" being reported in their system is named "Anonymous" or "No Name Given" or something equally stupid. I am proceeding on the assumption that Catherine Lhamon is neither that stupid, nor being deliberately misleading, and that she did in fact say the things she is quoted here as saying. But I'm including this caveat because I still find it hard to believe that what is being reported is even possible. Part of me still thinks there must be some mistake.
On one hand, like... I'm kind of impressed? There's someone who has decided to make their mark on the world, clearly. That's some tenacity. On the other hand, what the fuck? Surely in any sane world someone would tell this person, "you are abusing the process, and we are going to change the rules to rate-limit your nonsense."
That is... well, not the plan, apparently:
In FY 1981 the office was still dealing with the fallout of the American government forcibly engineering feminist aims into higher education. At a current budget of $140 million (an average of $250,000 per employee), with very nearly half of its complaints (across all topics, not just sex discrimination) coming from a single individual, what is that additional $38 million supposed to accomplish?
It seems like no matter how dim my view of the federal government gets, there's always some new piece of information out there waiting to assure me that I've yet to grasp the depth of the graft, ineptitude, and corruption of Washington, D.C. I am skeptical that Title IX has accomplished anything of value that would not have been independently accomplished by market forces and social trends. But even if that's wrong, and the early days of Title IX were an important government intervention, I cannot imagine how this particular situation could possibly exist within a sane regulatory framework.
Is this just bullshit jobs or is it just that you disagree with the thrust of the work being done? After all they aren't, in fact, just digging up and filling in holes, they are presumably collecting real data which is checked, setting up grievance procedures which can actually be used etc. and even if you think it's in pursuit of a pointless or harmful goal it is actual things being done and work produced. Indeed in one sense this is no different to say all of the legal/regulatory work a food company must do to ensures that all of its products comply with the regulations of all the relevant agencies, it just so happens that whereas in latter case the goal of the regulations is relatively uncontroversial in the former it isn't.
The definition of a Bullshit Job, as per Graeber's original essay, is exactly as you describe: one in which the product is useless or harmful, not one where there is no work done at all.
If that's the case I don't think the 'bullshit jobs' framework adds anything useful, because then it really just is a substitute for 'I don't agree with the policy goals the work being done aims toward'.
If memory serves, a big component of Graeber's theory was that a bullshit job is, in part, one in which even the person doing it doesn't think they're doing anything important or contributing anything of value. I don't actually know, but I imagine that describes plenty of Title IX administrators.
That just seems like a function of specialisation though, in a highly specialised world is clearly going to be quite difficult for a lot of workers to see how they fit into the entire economy/organisational bureaucracy.
I'm not here to relitigate the entirety of Graeber's theory, and his estimate of how prevalent the phenomenon is is known to be significantly wide of the mark. I just don't accept the idea that any job in which people work hard necessarily needs to exist or serves a useful function. There are plenty of people who are self-aware enough to suspect that their job does not really need to exist, and in many cases they're right.
I don't dispute that the people hired to pump petrol at petrol stations (because the state forbids people from pumping their own petrol) are actually working hard. That doesn't mean that "full-time petrol station attendant" is a job that actually needs to exist, as plainly evidenced by the fact that this is an exception rather than the norm.
Neither am I of course, but on the face it does seem a little silly to suggest that a worker must know the overall significance of their role to make their job worthwhile. I'm certainly not excluding the possibility of bullshit jobs in general, and I do agree that just because someone works hard that doesn't mean their job is at all important or meaningful.
So we end up with a quadrant:
People who think their jobs are meaningful/important, and they are
People who think their jobs are meaningful/important, but they aren't
People who think their jobs aren't meaningful/important, but they are
People who think their jobs aren't meaningful/important, and they aren't
"Bullshit jobs" originally referred to those in Q4, but really ought to encompass those in Q2 as well: if a job is meaningless or pointless, the fact that the person holding it doesn't realise it's meaningless or pointless doesn't change that. It's entirely possible for a person to think that their job is meaningless or unimportant, and for their appraisal to be inaccurate (Q3).
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More the former than the latter, though I am less certain than you seem to be that these are meaningfully different things. I regard most administrative positions in higher education, as well as most federal regulatory positions, as bullshit jobs--specifically, "box tickers" and "taskmasters." When you say "actual things being done and work produced," you're assuming something for which I see no evidence. You can say "those administrators are not just filling holes" but that's very nearly all I ever see them doing--filling out paperwork no one ever likely read, just in case someone else files a lawsuit that will make no substantial difference to anyone except, maybe, a successful plaintiff in search of an easy payday. If it is your position that the litigiousness of American society, and its attendant bloated insurance market, is actually a good thing, then sure--we have a real, substantive value disagreement. But if that's not your position, then your argument here is ill-aimed.
(The "bullshit" part is also substantially demonstrated by 77% of the complaints being made by a single person. I have no idea who that person might be. Charitably: a top-notch attorney at an important law firm in Washington, D.C., who is capturing most of the "Title IX complaint" market, maybe? The right intake process could probably make this happen. I just have a hard time seeing it actually playing out this way; unless their "sometimes founded" complaints turn into outrageously large payouts on a pretty regular basis, it would be very difficult to fund such a venture. Part of the mystery of averaging 20 complaints a day is, who is funding that?)
Autistic cell dwellers don’t tend to swing that way, politically, but you kind of have to be one to do that, or be the staff lawyer for an NGO dedicated to filing title IX complaints.
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I'm not settling on either side here, but this seems a little uncharitable. For one, in one sense even if no-one ever reads most of the stuff produced, and if (and I accept this may not be the case but nevertheless, if) lawsuits filed are on relatively substantive grounds rather than trivial procedural matters then the work is still important. Because, presumably, if a Title IX coordinator felt that a particular aspect of college administration did not comply the college would be anxious to make the appropriate changes, which if one agrees with the thrust of Title IX is a good thing.
This is a bit of a cumbersome explanation so here's a instance of a Title IX lawsuit that came up in a cursory google search. James Haidak was a student who recently sued his university for having a biased procedure when it expelled him following accusations by his ex-girlfriend, and on appeal he won on the grounds that he was never given a chance to defend himself in any kind of hearing etc., and now presumably it is the role of Title IX coordinators to ensure the their own universities have adequate procedures in this regard so they don't get hit by similar suits. So even if all their work now sits in a drawer forever they were actually doing something.
The key question of course is whether that many of the lawsuits they spend their time protecting against are substantial, or mostly trivial. Now this seems very hard to assess given that presumably the ones covered in the media are selected for the most interesting and meaningful ones, but a cursory search does throw up lots of cases that do seem at least somewhat worthwhile. Plenty of cases on the need for a fair shake to be given to accused students prior to expulsion, one about a kid who died from alcohol poising following an initiation (the parents demanding tighter restrictions on such) and yes lots of cases about women's athletics. Not, I appreciate, a life or death issue but a 'real' thing in the sense that Title IX cases etc. did actually increases access to college sport for women, which seems to indicate that more than box-ticking is being done, even if in some instances the work is over something that one could consider rather trivial in the grand scheme of things.
This is a great example, which very much supports my position over yours. Why the hell was Haidak kicked out in the first place? Because Title IX has been interpreted to require universities to referee adolescent relationships! Title IX created the problem (via campus administration), and Title IX "fixed" the problem (via the judiciary)--an exceptionally clear case of digging a hole, then filling it in.
No. The key question is whether the benefits of Title IX outweigh the costs.
In a hypothetical world where there was no such thing as Title IX, how do you think college sports would look today? Universities have undergone all sorts of changes in response to cultural revolutions and the realities of supply and demand. Did Title IX just make obligatory something that would have happened organically? Did it hasten an ongoing process? If so, then the regulatory cost was onerous and the fact that we're still paying it is stupid. Did Title IX instead fundamentally re-engineer a piece of American society, forcing a change to which Americans would have otherwise never consented? If so, then the price was even more onerous, paid in liberty instead of dollars. As far as I can tell, Title IX itself can only either have been unnecessary (in which case: it spawned mostly bullshit jobs), or necessary, in which case it is seriously objectionable on other grounds.
My question goes back even a bit further than that - how the hell is the business of the United States federal government? Regardless of whether the legislation and its enforcement mechanism creates some downstream utilitarian good, I cannot fathom why correct university policies and procedures for handling disputes regarding sexual harassment needs to come from the federal government.
14th amendment, baby!
Unlike most of the bill of rights, the Equal Protection Clause specifically, unambiguously, constrains the states. Given that sexual harassment disparately impacts women, it falls under the umbrella of Things Congress is Allowed to Legislate.
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Worse: the requirement was codified by a now-rescinded Dear Colleague letter from the Obama administration requiring schools adopt these policies.
Doesn’t that just require schools to consider rape and other sexual violence, even if it happened off-campus? I think it’s fair to say a frat-house rape is potentially part of the school environment even if said house is not school property.
The problem arises when schools engage with more nebulous definitions of harassment and hostile environments. I’m not seeing where that comes from this letter.
(Though it does predate A Rape on Campus by several years. I wonder when it was rescinded?)
It was rescinded by Betsy DeVos in 2017.
IIRC the controversial "refereeing of adolescent relationships" portion was driven by a requirement to review sexual harassment and sexual assault allegations with a preponderance of evidence (civil) standard, which put school administrators in a position of having to establish parallel judicial systems because an act that didn't meet "beyond a reasonable doubt" in criminal court can absolutely meet a preponderance of evidence.
IMO punishing students with things like expulsion needs higher than a 51% standard of evidence.
That’s a good point. What you’re saying also matches the conversation I remember from my time in school. Preponderance of evidence definitely came up.
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Can't say for certain of course but I am fairly confident that universities would want to punish rape/sexual assault quite harshly even without Title IX.
Well sure but that doesn't really address the question of the bullshit-ness of the jobs, that's then just an ordinary policy debate.
I suspect that as you suggest the growth of women's sports was happening anyway but nonetheless Title IX accelerated and shaped those changes (same for the other areas that Title IX impacts).
What does this have to do with anything? First: no, in cases of rape and sexual assault the universities would be best off letting the police handle it. Universities should not in general be in the business of punishing criminal activity. They don't even generally have the expertise to reasonably investigate it. Not even the people running Title IX offices are, as a rule, trained to investigate and prosecute crimes. (Frankly it would be preferable for higher education become completely sex-segregated, than for us to ask a bunch of academics to hold the kangaroo courts they generally hold on such matters.)
But second, what do you think this has to do with Haidak?
Neither rape nor sexual assault appear to be implicated here at all. This was a lover's spat--to even call it "domestic violence" would take things too seriously. This is exactly what I said it was: Title IX being interpreted to require universities to referee adolescent relationships, something universities might be even worse at than refereeing charges of sexual assault.
I feel like you are telling me that you don't understand bullshit jobs without telling me you don't understand bullshit jobs. A job in which the cost of the job outweighs the benefits of the job just is a bullshit job.
Agreed: it "shaped" the process by implementing pointless bureaucracy for no discernible benefit. The perceived benefits were coming anyway, without the costs. Now the status quo is so entrenched that nobody will countenance ending those costs; indeed, the discussion is that we should pay more for a process that should never have been started in the first place. This is paradigmatic bullshittery.
Re: Haidak I have to plead ignorance on how much of the UMass grievance procedure is shaped by Title IX requirements, but either way I don't think it is really that important to the broader point.
If 'government jobs where I feel that the cost outweighs the benefit' comes under 'bullshit jobs' then it's a stupid and pointless framework. Look at it this way, I would say that the work Islamic morality police do in Iran or wherever is an instance where the negatives clearly outweigh the (in my mind, non-existent) positives, but surely calling that a 'bullshit job' makes no sense. They fulfil their intended function pretty well, just as Title IX administrators probably do/did fulfil the function of expanding women's sport, changing sexual allegation grievance procedures etc. etc. There surely has to be some distinction between 'jobs where nothing meaningful happens' and 'jobs where something happens but I don't like the thing'.
I mean, it was your example, so to backpedal when it becomes clear that the example cuts against your argument seems like poor sportsmanship, but sure.
There's nothing about feeling happening here, and it is bad rhetoric for you to sneak that in there. My argument is that the supposed "benefits" of Title IX could have manifested without bringing along the obscene degree of bureaucracy. You conceded that point:
And that's all you need to concede to agree with me. A bullshit job is not a job where nothing ever happens, or nothing meaningful ever happens, or things happen that I don't like. It's a job that either adds nothing, or is actively harmful, compared to a world where the job was never brought into existence in the first place. And you have already conceded everything you need to concede for Title IX jobs to fit that description. I think someone else has already pointed this out to you elsewhere in the thread, but you seem to have an idea of "bullshit jobs" that does not match with the sociological writing that coined the phrase.
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Indeed, in the country where I went to school, the idea of university being an arbitrator in the personal relationships between the students would be rightly seen as ludicrous. This simply never happens, except, maybe, when you get a criminal conviction (in which case being kicked out of school is probably least of your problems). Even when you get a disciplinary sanction by a university, you can appeal to a regular administrative court (i.e. one ran by the state, not by university) as part of normal process.
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