Write for ACME-Dollars!!!!

I've railed against bloated, ignorant capitalists often--they're easy targets and it's fun--but sometimes they just walk into things. When they do, they totally deserve whatever we might dish out to them. Today I received some hilarious, yet deeply disturbing news from a friend of mine.

Several of my friends and I write for an educational publisher. Many of them got involved when we were still in graduate school; some, like me, got started a bit later, but since this publisher is near our alma mater it was, given the economy, only a matter of time before a great many of us started word-slinging for food. I've nothing negative whatsoever to say against the editors--I know several of them, one particularly well, and they are smart, decent, and good people. The owners, however, are another story. The company is notorious in the town of its headquarters for low-pay and high turn-over, something that they can, for a time at least, afford to do with an inexhaustible supply of graduate slave labor to hand...

Long story short, this good friend of mine, a medieval expert and an authority on the military orders, was contacted to be part of a large project. He tells it better than I could, so here it is, with the name of the company changed to Wile E. Coyote's favorite supplier:

"ACME sent me a call to arms; they need people to work on a new project, but it is one of those where they pay you with what they call"ACME Dollars"!!!!!!!! I mean, I am not even making this up! I felt like telling them that my landlord only accepts U.S. currency and so I cannot accept their offer at this time... Sancho, you tell me why the fuck anyone working for these people would want to be paid in ACME dollars???? I mean, who needs access to this stuff??/ WE write it, for God's sake!!"

Exactly. This friend, like me, has a PhD in history, and while we enjoy and value writing for a high-school/junior college audience--and believe it is a moral imperative to get information out of the off-white tower--the stuff we write we write for budding scholars. It ain't stuff we use for research and as my colleague points out, it sure isn't going to pay the rent, or those massive school loans.

It says a lot, really, about the value of education in this country. It is sad, on the one hand, that the executives at ACME think academics and high-school freshman have the same needs for information. Simplistically, they do--a freshman history student might want to learn more about the Plantagenets, but a scholar might want to look at edited copies of the Plantagenet charters--in Latin. So, similar, and yet, different. On the other hand, that the company would stoop to a base trick to entice potential writers, few if any of whom will find the offer attractive, is just plain sick. These writers make the company what it is--without them, there is no text, nothing to sell, no profit. I cannot name one academic I know who couldn't use the real cash. Contrary to public opinion, college professors do not make a lot of money, not in the humanities anyway. Just for an example, I was interviewing for a position at a college in Los Angeles about six years ago, and we're talking a non-tenure track, full-time position (five classes a semester)--starting pay was 33,000. In Los Angeles. I asked the committee, "um, where do you live?" Most said "Lancaster." WOW. I hear now that even this desert outpost is too expensive for junior faculty.

ACME-Dollars? F--- you.