On public education and the crisis

This week has brought together many threads of stories that appear to be knitting themselves into a recognizable pattern.  Some of these threads:

• Riding home on the #28 trolley in Lisbon, our driver stops and tells the passengers to get off because a demonstration has blocked traffic further up the tracks.  We follow the tracks back toward our neighborhood and encounter about 200 teachers holding a street demonstration and carrying signs protesting cuts in teachers’ wages and in school funding.  The protest was organized by a teachers’ union that has an office in our neighborhood, which is not far from the Portuguese Parliament.  
• I meet my UNL host professor.  While eating lunch together, she mentions that last fall, all public workers (including university professors like herself) were told that they would receive a 10% pay cut beginning in January 2011.  She said that she received her paycheck, and it was indeed 10% less.  
• When I met another colleague, a researcher at the Institute for the Social Sciences, she said the same thing--that she, too, had received a 10% cut starting this month.
• Our university chancellor sent us an email saying that now that the federal stimulus funds have ended, UMass is about $29 million in the hole.  This most likely means we will raise students’ fees and faculty will not get the raise that was bargained fair and square with the state.  You only have it on paper!
• I had an email exchange with a colleague at Illinois and asked after her husband, who I also know.  She said he has just been laid off from his contract teaching position there, and they feel pretty depressed about it.

All in all, students, workers, and professionals in public education in the U.S. and the European periphery are paying for a financial crisis they had very little to do with.  

The one bright spot: According to i Magazine, if you’re a Portuguese civil engineer or architect, Brazil needs you!  There was a news item about all the construction under way for the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics there.  Brazil’s university’s do not produce enough engineers, apparently.

Some big questions about Portugal and the crisis

Today is the day after the 2011 presidential election in Portugal, which was won by a landslide by the incumbent center-right Social Democratic candidate, Aníbal Cavaco Silva.  There was a pretty low turnout, not surprising because the polls were indicating that it would not be a close election.  People were reading the story in the paper at the café across the street from the boys’ new school.   

Michael and I have started keeping a list of questions we have about Portugal after our first week in Lisbon.  These include:

·      We have been saying that both Hungary and Portugal are “post-authoritarian” societies on Europe’s periphery—but does “post-authoriarian” matter in any important way?  For example, are things in Portugal, Greece, and Hungary different in a meaningful way from things in Ireland or Iceland, which did not have mid-20^th century dictatorships?  In other words, we are acknowledging that the statement, “Countries X, Y, and Z have qualities attributable to their common trait of having once been dictatorships” is a working hypothesis.

·      Another hypothesis: One way that “post-authoritarian” states might have in common is the kind of welfare state left behind, upon which post-dictatorship life is based.  Portugal seems to have a rather thin welfare state overall, but people like my Portuguese teacher Antonio Reis have mentioned clientelistic pensions as a factor in the current crisis.  This could be similar to Italy. 

·      We are wondering, ethnographically, how ordinary Portuguese people understand the current crisis.  What do they see as its roots?  How did/do they know it is happening?  When did they first know about it?  Where do they get information about this new reality and the representations of it?  What are their survival or coping strategies?  How are people affected, and how are they getting by? 

·      How are Portuguese people imagining their future and the future of their children?  How does this differ from what they expected a few years ago? 

·      In Lisbon, you also see many people who appear to have immigrated from other countries—either Lusophone countries like Cape Verde, Angola, and Brazil, or EU countries like Bulgaria.  What about immigrants’ hopes and expectations?  How is the crisis affecting their opportunities and the way others treat them?  Kesha Fikes’ book describes how Cape Verdean women, by the early 2000s, were moving entirely into jobs as domestic workers for white Portuguese employers (rather than working as fishmongers and other informal vendors).  These jobs were previously held mostly by working-class Portuguese women.  How will this change as unemployment rises and Portuguese women seek jobs as domestic workers?

·      When we have asked several Portuguese people about why the crisis happened, they linked it to personal consumer debt.  Antonio and Fatima both mentioned this as a factor somehow.  To what extent is this true, and why does this seem to be a dominant story about the crisis?

·      Is this a gendered crisis?  How are men and women’s lives being affected by unemployment, cuts in entitlements, and uncertainty?