My Letter To Ajit Pai

As I am sure you know, net neutrality is currently under threat. Here's the letter I wrote to Ajit Pai, the Chairman of the FCC's board. I know that he is probably not going to change his mind, but I will also be writing a separate letter to the other board members, including Michael O'Rielly and Brendan Carr, the two other board members likely to vote for it. There will also be protests at Verizon stores soon, please make sure to get your bodies out there and tell your family, friends and neighbors to do something. The stakes are too high for apathy or being too cool for school, folks.

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I am writing to you as a concerned citizen regarding your recent moves to undermine the rules for Internet service providers known as “net neutrality.” I am sure that you have heard from plenty of other people on this issue, and I would hope that my voice, added to theirs, could convince you to change your mind.

The internet is not a product, it is a national resource. It is currently where most of this nation’s public sphere plays out. As I would hope you know, the public sphere is the lifeblood of any functioning democracy. This is why in years past that the FCC has regulated radio, television, and the internet in ways that prevent distortions in the public sphere. Without those regulations the public sphere simply becomes an object to be sold to the highest bidder. The current presidential administration has been hostile to the fourth estate and seems quite comfortable with letting those with the most money have the most say. That is an assault on democracy, I would hope that you would not want to be complicit in such behavior.

Net neutrality is crucial to having a functioning public sphere in America. It prevents internet service providers, who have practical monopolies in many places, from imposing their political agendas. It allows those on the margins of society to have their voices heard without having to pay extra for it. Beyond protecting the public sphere, it prevents internet service providers from forcing their customers to pay more money to access certain parts of the internet. After all, the internet is a national resource that originated with the Department of Defense. Why should private corporations be allowed to squeeze the last dollar out of a vital institution that was built with public money? As always, it seems that corporations are the biggest “welfare queens” of them all.

I would also like to add that your former employment by Verizon concerns me. Any notion that you are totally objective on this issue, or that your primary interests lie with the American public, strain credulity. As a Verizon customer I can attest that their main concern is squeezing their customers, who are held captive because of their monopoly power, for as much money as possible. I am sure you earned a healthy salary from people like me being chiseled, but please look at the big picture. Ending net neutrality will not unleash “innovation” but will simply enable Verizon and the other wealthy telecommunications giants to engage in rent-seeking behavior.

Perhaps as a former lawyer for that corporation you are fine with that, but I would hope that you would look deeper into yourself and think long and hard about doing the right thing. We are in a moment of great historical importance, and our democracy is standing on a precipice. If I were you I would not want my name to go down in infamy as one of the enablers of the destruction of the American public sphere, and by extension, American democracy itself.

Take Action On Grad Student Tuition Waivers

This post is not one where I am going to analyze politics or riff on pop culture, no sir. I know most of my readers are academics or former academics, and so y'all know that the new tax bill would tax graduate student tuition waivers. This would have prevented most of us, including yours truly, from going to grad school. I know that they are whipping votes for this tax bill in the House next week, and I think we need to flood our representatives with letters and calls about this. I know my rep in New Jersey has my back, so I wrote the representative for the district where I went to grad school, who happens to be a Republican. I will share that letter below. However, I also plan on contacting my alma mater to demand they get off their asses and lobby said rep to do the right thing by his district. I recommend that the rest of you do the same. Kvetching about it on social media alone doesn't solve a damn thing.

Anyway, here's the letter:

I am a proud graduate of the University of Illinois, where I earned my PhD in history. My six years in Champaign-Urbana were some of the best and most fruitful of my life. My graduate degree allowed me to become a university professor and a now teacher at a private high school. The knowledge I learned at Illinois is something that makes in impact on young people every day I go into the classroom, and it is one of the things that I am most grateful for.

It is thus with great trepidation and sadness that I have learned that the current tax overhaul proposal in Congress would start taxing tuition waivers granted by universities to graduate students. Without my tuition waiver there is no way that I would have been able to complete my studies. During my graduate education I worked as a teaching assistant, earning less than $20,000 a year and barely scraping by. Having to pay taxes on a much larger amount of money than I was actually earning would have ended my graduate career.

There are literally thousands of graduate students at the University of Illinois in this situation. The U of I, as I am sure you are aware, is one of the biggest economic assets that the 13^th district possesses. It draws in people from around the country and around the world, many who fall in love with central Illinois and become great assets to its economy and communities. The so-called “Silicon Prairie” would not exist without a fresh group of graduate students in the computer sciences.

What does the government actually gain by taxing poor graduate students? The revenue will be slight, but the negative impact will be tremendous. It is also morally outrageous for a tax plan to do this to graduate students while simultaneously making it so wealthy children can inherit more of their parents’ money or for massive corporations to pay the same tax rate that I, the teacher and spouse of a teacher, will be paying under the new plan.

While it might be a lost cause to persuade you to reject such giveaways to the richest Americans, I at least hope that you can see that the tax on graduate student tuition waivers will have a horrible impact on thousands of your constituents and be extremely bad for the district whose interests you have promised to represent. If you cannot reject the current tax bill wholesale, at least work to eliminate the tax on tuition waivers. If you refuse, I must assume you serve masters other than the people of central Illinois.