Does payment strengthen or erode respect?
Questions from the age of monetization
I used to teach an essay titled “Six Seconds.” A judge asked the author, Paula Speck, to evaluate a settlement for children whose parents died in a Pan Am plane crash. A jury had awarded the survivors $20,000 for their parents’ six seconds of physical and mental anguish before death, and the airline appealed. Speck’s job was to review other cases and determine whether the verdict was fair.
If this were a creative writing class, we’d go on to examine the masterful structure of the essay. Speck hooks us with a preposterous question: how suffering can possibly be measured in monetary terms, much less calculated by the second. The answer to that question turns out to be mundane: the verdict was consistent with others, which was all the judge really wanted to know. Case closed. But after answering that question, she poses another that raises the stakes considerably: is it a curse or a mercy to be conscious during one’s final moments?
It’s a great formula for journalism and memoir: as soon as one burning question is answered, pose another (preferably with broader implications). In fiction, the same principle holds. Once one threat is neutralized, introduce a scarier one. Some of us read to know we’re not alone, but a lot of us read to see what happens, where the story ends.
But this is not a creative writing class, and my concern is more with the original itch that pushed Speck to write her essay. She doesn’t say this overtly, but she was disturbed by her task. It wasn’t that she objected to holding Pan Am accountable so much as that her job required her to monetize pain. The result that satisfied the court did not satisfy her one bit.
I’ve been thinking about monetization lately, how difficult it is to talk about, yet how fundamental it has become to the digital age. Speck never really resolved the ethical conundrum at the heart of her essay, and I’m not sure I have an argument to make on the subject so much as a series of observations. Think of them as juxtapositions or tensions. Perhaps you can help me make sense of them in the comments.
1.
My alma mater just agreed to pay Matt Rhule more than $9 million per year as head football coach. Even after adjusting for inflation, that is roughly 35 times more than Tom Osborne was paid in 1997, his final year at Nebraska, when he won the national title. And that after amassing 255 wins, 13 conference titles, 12 bowl wins, and two other national championships. This is an extraordinary example because Rhule will be paid vastly more to achieve vastly less. Fans will be happy if the team is bowl eligible next year.
That is like paying $3.5 million for a home with a rotting roof and a termite infestation that was worth $100,000 twenty-five years ago, brand new. I know of no equivalent in any other profession, where the quality of the work and the level of pay have effectively traded places.
2.
“Six Seconds” was first published by Meridian, a literary journal produced by the University of Virginia. Like most literary journals, Meridian pays its authors with two copies of the issue in which they are published. So, essentially, bupkus. The publication, and the ostensible prestige that it represents, is the only compensation. Sometimes authors get lucky, like Speck did, and win an additional honor, such as inclusion in the next year’s Best American Essays anthology.
Speck’s essay was published in Best American Essays 2005, a volume that I taught for more than fifteen years. Best American doesn’t pay the authors it includes (that I can tell), and Speck never made a dime from any of my courses, though her essay was often my students’ favorite.
Amazon made money on the essay, however, through its used book marketplace.
3.
Maybe it’s a coincidence, but since I left academe I’ve been getting messages from Uversity, a newish company that wants to buy my old course materials. They begin by appealing to my altruism.
A good business solves a problem in the world, but Chegg, the corporate owner of Uversity, is obviously out to make a buck. When they try to do that by guilting me (if I don’t sell them my stuff, I’m deciding not to help all of these students), I stop listening. But then they deliver the real pitch.
I taught at least twenty different course preps over twenty years, counting graduate school, but somehow I don’t think Chegg is going to pay me $92,000 for all that. If you wondered about that footnote, here’s the caveat. You have to register, submit all of your documents, and let Chegg sink its talons into you before you discover how much they’ll actually pay.
The letter goes on to say that by joining their team, I’d be “empowered to…inspire learning through [my] teaching content [and] earn money for my course materials.” They likely don’t mean to suggest that I wasn’t empowered in both of those ways before they contacted me, but that’s what the words say. And the mere fact that educators are being targeted in this way, presumably because they aren’t earning enough already, speaks for itself.
I never calculated how much I was getting paid by the hour while I was teaching full-time. Some semesters I worked a little harder than others, but the standard was always the same: whatever it took to connect. Some of my students might have thought of those courses as customer transactions, but I still think of them more like family memories. Even if Chegg were to offer three times their rate, how could I sell them the prompts I wrote for Personal Essay, where students often trusted me enough to write about assault, suicide attempts, and coming out as gay to their families? There was the unforgettable Metallica essay I mentioned earlier in this series, the essay a student wrote about her Aunt Dianne that made me cry, the one another student wrote about Goth subculture that made me laugh, and hundreds of others. Maybe I’m sentimental, but selling those assignments would feel like pawning my wedding ring.
Discussion questions, film clips, and other resources for two of my American literature courses remain available for free online: here and here. Those websites probably should have been password protected when I built them, but I don’t want someone to have to pay for them through Uversity. Take all you want, so long as you attribute the source. That’s what helping other students and teachers ought to look like. Right?
4.
The contract that Matt Rhule signed with the University of Nebraska makes no recognition of the sacrifices his wife and children must make for him to serve as head coach. In his first press conference, Rhule described his wife as a “grinder,” which his football audience understood to mean that she brings the same work ethic to their family life that he does to his coaching and recruiting. That was at least a token acknowledgement of her unpaid labor. But the checks from the university are not made out to Matt and Julie Rhule.
Andrew Yang often made this point during his 2020 presidential run, praising his wife Evelyn’s care for their son Christopher, who is neurodivergent. Yang often described Evelyn as “CEO of Team Christopher” and used his family to illustrate how a universal basic income could compensate caregivers, at least a little, for their contributions to families and to the national economy. Yang is not a perfect spokesperson for this issue, but his message never resonated more deeply than during the pandemic, when women absorbed three times as much of the childcare burden as men did. Julie Rhule was assuredly one of them.
The number of stay-at-home dads has nearly doubled since 1989, according to the Pew Research Center. Men still only account for about 17% of full-time caregivers, but as Richard Reeves suggests in his new book, Of Boys and Men, the way gender inequity is often framed creates a false choice: one typically feels they have to pick a side. It’s possible to acknowledge that unpaid labor devoted to childcare disproportionately impacts women while also recognizing that many men are also contributing to their families in ways that have no overt economic value.
5.
I have published roughly thirty pieces in literary magazines and nine articles in peer-reviewed journals. Like Paula Speck, I was paid nothing but contributor copies for most of that material. Although my first book was a success by university press standards, I have bought exactly one bottle of mid-shelf bourbon with the royalties. That’s just how it is with most academic work.
When I was up for tenure and promotion, these publications carried some cachet, since they made for a rather long CV. And I still get a thrill when an elite journal chooses to share its pages with me. But as an independent writer I find myself less willing to pay dozens of $3 submission fees, only to wait for six to ten months for a reply that is, most of the time, a “no.” Increasingly, when it’s a “yes” I feel a little deflated because I’m giving my work away. In the best case, writers and editors consider themselves bound together by art, and some of those collaborations develop into abiding friendships. But literary journals increasingly make me feel like we’re using each other before moving on to the next Tinder date.
If this sounds like a contradiction with what I just said about Uversity above, it may well be. I haven’t quite decided how to think about writing and money: what should be paid, what should be free. As Joy Lanzendorfer says, submission fees began as a way to recognize unpaid labor by editors and staff who run their magazines with little institutional support. But the practice turns publishing into a transaction that, reduced to those terms, feels exploitative to the writer.
As Tara Westover said in a panel discussion of rural and urban cultures at Harvard Kennedy School, the gig economy seems not to have made people feel more valued even though it was meant to be more empowering. She said, “It's almost like workers don't exist anymore. Only their time exists. You buy 15 minutes of the time, or you buy an hour of that time…. The gig economy is that people are more or less expendable and you really only ever have to pay for the exact 10-minute increment of their time that you use.”
6.
Today my Twitter feed was full of news about Husker players who had entered the transfer portal. Some fans were reminding everyone that entering the portal didn’t mean players were leaving, just that they were reopening the bidding for Name, Image, and Likeness deals. Many of the players at Nebraska are already making six figures from NIL. But, as someone said, there’s nothing wrong with asking for a raise. Is there? NIL deals were meant to reduce exploitation of college athletes, but it’s created inequities between teammates and has raised new concerns about predatory boosters.
You might be able to tell me that I’m off topic if these were professional athletes, but they are still students. They can only play if they are enrolled at a university and if they earn passing grades. Many of those courses are taught by adjuncts and graduate students who are paid $4,000 per course over sixteen weeks. With no health benefits. Teachers aren’t supposed to think about their pay — we think it’s impolite, somehow — but when an academic institution that claims to be a non-profit can pay a coach more than 200 times the amount of a full-time instructor who is integral to the team’s eligibility, the culture of the institution is tarnished. In fact, that pay gap is starting to look a lot like the gulf between CEOs and their employees.
But Josh, you say, the football team donates to the library! Jeff Bezos and other billionaires routinely drop sizable scraps of charity, too, but that is not a healthy economic system.
7.
Uversity supports the notion that expert teachers are replaceable. This was a sensitive subject with Iowa friends who taught in the public high school and whose students, often the most ambitious ones, took online English courses through the Des Moines Area Community College. I understand the financial reasoning: why pay private college tuition for four years when you can transfer in a pile of credits for less? But sometimes as department chair I was in the position of deciding whether to allow those courses to count toward our major. My thoughts often drifted to my cousin, a retired Marine, who had to start at Square One in boot camp with all of the other recruits no matter how many trail runs in Montana he’d done. This is another little secret about academic assessment: there is no way to meaningfully evaluate a program if half of the credits counted toward it can be completed elsewhere.
Humanities courses — composition and literature — are the flyover country of higher education. The credits everyone wants to “get out of the way” or drive through to get somewhere else. I learned that the Midwest is more than that, and most of the students I taught discovered the same about creative writing and literature if they stuck with me for a full term. Yet the perceptions persist.
Maybe the smart thing to do is fork over those course materials to Uversity while they’re still offering something for them, take the money, and run. Maybe if Evelyn Yang could convert the hours she spends on caregiving into cash, she would.
8.
When my friend Brian and I launched a podcast, which is still available for free, we thought it was a success because we secured funding from Humanities Iowa, Central College, and the National Endowment for the Humanities for a two-year series. Yet we drew just 200 downloads per episode per month, even after buying ads on NPR. That number typically needs to be 10,000 downloads per episode per month to attract advertisers, which is how most podcasts sustain themselves.
Brian and I mostly did what we set out to do, and I stand by the quality of our series. But I’ve grown increasingly aware of how difficult it is in the digital age to disentangle quality from the volume of downloads or clicks. Postmodernists used to say that sex and death were the only real things. Numbers rule the world now.
9.
In 1774, the top 1% of American households controlled 9.3% of wealth. In 2012, the top 1% controlled 20%. By the end of 2021, the top 1% owned 32.3% of wealth in America.
The wealth gap between white and Black Americans in 2022 is 6 to 1. This has remained effectively unchanged since 1970.
The U.S. has the highest level of income inequality among developed nations. For more data, see the World Inequality Database.
According to Stephen Marché in The Next Civil War, “every society in human history with levels of inequality like those in the United States today has descended into war, revolution, or plague. No exceptions.” Among Marché’s sources for this claim are Nick Hanauer, Brian Faler, and a 2018 Economic Policy Institute report by Estelle Sommeiler and Mark Price. It checks out.
10.
Paula Speck never went on to write a book, at least not one that I can find. She has no author page or any digital footprint, really, other than the trail left by “Six Seconds” and one travel essay. Presumably she is still working somewhere as an attorney or has retired by now, unaware of what her essay meant to me and to my students.
Speck resolved her case by showing that the compensation awarded to surviving children of the Pan Am crash victims fit within the range of other comparable awards. That made the dollar amount reasonable. Some use a similar logic to say that Matt Rhule’s salary is reasonable in light of dramatic spikes in television revenue from college football.
In the end, Speck could not say whether it was objectively more merciful to go sentiently into that good night or to slip away under cover of sleep. Death is too mysterious to resolve once and for all. I find money much the same. I am not sure whether payment strengthens or erodes respect, whether dignity and financial inequity can coexist, whether one can belong to an institution as an alumnus or employee or emeritus professor without caring about how its financial dealings convey its values. The most powerful advantage that money confers is the ability to think about other things. We’d usually rather talk about anything else, and yet there are moments, like the one Speck experienced during her research of the Pan Am appeal, when a financial transaction jangles against our humanity, and the only answer is a question that we carry throughout an essay and still fail to resolve.
My students often agreed with me that Speck’s ending is nearly perfect because it transfers the conundrum that haunted her to readers, who then cannot help but carry the same riddle away within themselves. I’ll close with those final five lines, along with the invitation to continue the conversation in the comments.
“I have given up trying to decide whether the society I live and earn my living in is wise or shallow in its approach to death. I have only tentative conclusions, subject to revision and applicable only to myself. One is that I’d like to look my death in the face when and however it comes. If I get my wish, I hope my family won’t ask to be paid for it. Although I’d prefer to postpone the meeting.”
This Friday I plan to experiment with a discussion thread either inspired by today’s post, the ensuing exchange in the comments, or by something else entirely that comes up between now and then. Watch your inbox for an invitation to participate. If you have a question that you’d like to explore with other readers of this series, you can either reply to this email or contact me directly at dolezaljosh@gmail.com.
You mention English courses taken at DMACC and how that is a sensitive subject. You are quite right there. Iowa's concurrent enrollment program is almsot entirely driven by financial motivations, not education, and thus pervasively lacks genuine oversight. And you are right to question those credentials, as the local high schools are not held accountable to collegaite standards through that program, and DMACC does not hold them to account. For instance, it doesn't have course standards to hold anyone to account, and resists doing so.
This speaks to your overall theme of the monetization of education, the soul-rending moral compromises that educators face, and the general lack of integrity that ensues under these conditions.
Once, after years of publishing my creative work for "bupkus," I received an award for a poem in the amount of $1000. I was very happy, and so I told one of the men who worked where I worked -- I was in an hourly lowest-paid position and he was in a salaried higher-paid regional-sales position: "I won $1000!" I told him, and I explained the details. He shook his head sadly at me and said "you really shouldn't be doing it for the money -- art isn't about money."
I was fucking speechless because obviously and of course it had NEVER been about money! I'd spent more on my art than I'd ever make from it. And I never wrote with dollar signs in my mind. But to be acknowledged with what was for me an enormous amount of money was an honor!
Sometimes money is a widow's mite -- and what it means comes from its precarity. I've given a homeless men two dollars on the street when I only had maybe six dollars in bills and change in my pocket. That meant a lot, and that guy was really appreciative.
A corporation grudgingly handing over $20,000 for the unique and irreplaceable lives of your parents, via the courts, and willing to pay less if they can, is the obverse-inverse-upside-down of the widow's mite.
Somewhere between these extremes is a money-made acknowledgment of gratitude -- a "tip."
And then there is the green space that many academic creative writers (this describes me) enjoy, where my work is salaried, keeps me involved in my art no matter my ups and downs, and if I receive a financial acknowledgement of my work, I am pleased, but I am not going to run myself ragged to get it. I also, with full respect to those who labor on literary magazines, do not like to pay a "reading fee" or submission fee -- and have done so maybe three times in the past 10 years. (I wish they felt as honored by my $3 as I would be if they'd replied to me with a $3 Venmo of appreciation! Ha!)
Capitalism always demands we non-utilitarians carve our crazy paths around its orderly system. I have to pay to eat, but I refuse to prostrate myself to the almighty dollarbuck. So I have to wiggle around in the middle. And that salesman back then was right: don't do art for money. But don't scold an artist for being happy about a money prize either. Appreciation can take many forms.