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Before employers rush to hold — or raise — everyone's salary to $75,000, the study points out that there are actually two types of happiness. There's your changeable, day-to-day mood: whether you're stressed or blue or feeling emotionally sound. Then there's the deeper satisfaction you feel about the way your life is going — the kind of thing Tony Robbins tries to teach you. While having an income above the magic $75,000 cutoff doesn't seem to have an impact on the former (emotional well-being), it definitely improves people's Robbins-like life satisfaction. In other words, the more people make above $75,000, the more they feel their life is working out on the whole. But it doesn't make them any more jovial in the mornings.

The study, by economist Angus Deaton and psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who has won a Nobel Prize for Economics, analyzed the responses of 450,000 Americans polled by Gallup and Healthways in 2008 and 2009. Participants were asked how they had felt the previous day and whether they were living the best possible life for them. They were also asked about their income.

The authors found that most Americans — 85% — regardless of their annual income, felt happy each day. Almost 40% of respondents also reported feeling stressed (which is not mutually exclusive with happiness) and 24% had feelings of sadness. Most people were also satisfied with the way their life was going.

(See TIME's special issue on the science of happiness.)

So, where does the $75,000 come into play? Researchers found that lower income did not cause sadness itself but made people feel more ground down by the problems they already had. The study found, for example, that among divorced people, about 51% who made less than $1,000 a month reported feeling sad or stressed the previous day, while only 24% of those earning more than $3,000 a month reported similar feelings. Among people with asthma, 41% of low earners reported feeling unhappy, compared with about 22% of the wealthier group. Having money clearly takes the sting out of adversities.

At $75,000, that effect disappears. For people who earn that much or more, individual temperament and life circumstances have much more sway over their lightness of heart than money. The study doesn't say why $75,000 is the benchmark, but "it does seem to me a plausible number at which people would think money is not an issue," says Deaton. At that level, people probably have enough expendable cash to do things that make them feel good, like going out with friends. (The federal poverty level for a family of four, by the way, is $22,050.)

But in the bigger view of their lives, people's evaluations were much more tied to their income. The more they made, the more they felt their life was going well. The survey asked respondents to place themselves on a life-satisfaction ladder, with the first rung meaning their lives were not going well and the 10th rung meaning it was as good as it could be. The higher their income, the higher the rung people chose. "Importantly, the same percentage increase in income has the same effect on evaluation for everyone, rich or poor alike, even though the absolute dollar amounts differ," the authors write. So every 10% rise in annual income moves people up the satisfaction ladder the same amount, whether they're making $25,000 or $100,000. "High incomes don't bring you happiness, but they do bring you a life you think is better," conclude the authors. Might it be time for Oprah to give these guys their own show?

Past research on money and happiness has also found that it's not absolute wealth that's linked with happiness, but relative wealth or status — that is, how much more money you have than your neighbors.

It's no surprise, then, that when the same polls are done in different countries, Americans come out as a bit of a mixed lot: they're fifth in terms of happiness, 33rd in terms of smiling and 10th in terms of enjoyment. At the same time, they're the 89th biggest worriers, the 69th saddest and fifth most stressed people out of the 151 nations studied. Even so, perhaps because of the country's general wealth, they are in the top 10 citizenries where people feel their lives are going well, beaten out by such eternal optimists as the Canadians, New Zealanders and Scandinavians.

Having lived in the Bay Area for 20 years, with experience in multiple activist movements, I have seen my share of similar events fall prey to self-congratulatory art exhibits, tepid displays of diversity for its own sake, co-optation by well-meaning but institutional liberal nonprofits and similar organizations, lip service from local politicians, and the difficulty of maintaining and building on whatever alliances might outlast the buildup to what often become one-off meet-ups. This felt different, though, especially in light of other recent actions, like fast food workers and other allies showing up at local campuses forNational Adjunct Walkout Day on February 25, and adjuncts turning out in support of April 15’s national Fight for 15 actions. Students have worked alongside adjuncts and non-unionized staff to build viable networks of campus activism and artists, often saddled with student debt and unable to afford studio space, have lent their energies to supporting their peers caught in the nexus of the art-education-academic-corporate complex.

“Like so many other artists and academics,” said San Francisco Art Institute alum Jessica Tully, “I am inspired by the collective action and by seeing all the creative ways our art teachers are finding to make it feasible to continue to teach.”

It is no longer a stretch to draw connections between adjunct professors and other workers in the service economy. The corporate university model is deeply invested in the notion that treating all of its employees as disposable labor (while at the same time raising student tuitions at an unbelievable rate) can maximize profits. Currently, adjunct professors represent about 80% of all faculty at Bay Area colleges (the number was around 20% in 1970). Many adjuncts work semester-to-semester, contract-to-contract, meaning that we must hustle for work every summer, with no job security, no health benefits, and no institutional support for scholarly research and professional advancement. Many adjuncts have to take on additional work (either at other colleges or beyond academia), and an increasing number (including some full-time professors) now rely on public assistance to supplement their meager wages, meaning that the state is essentially subsidizing private universities. Clearly this is not a model that serves professors or students, much less any vision of liberal arts education most of us value as at least part of our mission.

“As an adjunct at an art college, I’ve seen the power of artistic creative advocacy for workers and social justice inspire, energize, and unite,” said David Skolnick, a senior lecturer at the California College of the Arts. “We are dedicated to improving working and learning conditions at our institution, but, more than that, we want to be part of a much larger movement that recognizes the primacy of the human over the corporation, social justice over profit margin, and democratic community over unaccountable hierarchy.”

For those who teach at arts colleges or in MFA programs — including the San Francisco Art Institute, California College of the Arts, Mills College (where I teach), and St. Mary’s, all of which have in the last year formed adjunct unions with SEIU local 1021 — adjunct professors face the challenge of trying to balance teaching with their own artistic pursuits, a tough equilibrium to maintain even for tenured artists and writers. To be an artist or writer in a vibrant yet expensive place like the Bay Area means grappling with high rents, lingering student debt, and limited free time and energies, all of which can take a toll on one’s artistic practices. Debt-ridden grad students are likewise realizing that for many, the costs of such arts programs far outweigh the supposed professional benefits of advanced degrees, especially as they see so many of their professors living paycheck to paycheck and struggling to find time to pursue their own artistic careers. Earlier this month, for example, the entire first-year class of the University of Southern California’s visual arts MFA programdropped out in protest of cuts, one more sign of the awakening of student, artist, and adjunct activism.

In the current anti-union climate in the US, where membership is down and neoliberal legislation at every level verges on outright union-busting, it is difficult to organize workers into an effective bargaining unit. It is even more difficult with part-time workers in fields such as academia. For a range of reasons, it has long been a challenge to unionize adjuncts. As contingent contract workers, for many of us our connection to where we work can feel tenuous. Some of us are too busy rushing from one campus to another, grading and prepping on the subway journey from one gig to the next, to ever establish relationships with peers and colleagues at any one school. Others may feel that an adjunct position is simply a temporary stop on the way to a tenure-track job, and thus don’t identify as alienated workers. Still others, we have found, tend to think of unions as the realm of the “working class” — more the purview of campus security and janitorial workers than professors and administration members. Despite such skepticism and deep structural challenges, adjuncts across the country have begun to realize that the increasingly corporatized university system does not have their interests in mind. Adjuncts, especially in the arts and humanities, are starting to recognize that the economic and political landscape requires a strong collective response, and adjunct unions have sprung up across the US as a result.

Over the last several years, USC's MFA program has been viewed as a model of what a graduate experience in studio art should look like: generous scholarship packages, teaching assistantships with cash awards, close ties to Los Angeles cultural institutions like MOCA, and a who's-who list of visiting artists and faculty (see Entire 2016 MFA Class Drops Out of USC's Roski School of Art and Design).

Ten current and former USC faculty members recently issued a statement of support of the students, also calling out the disconnected administration.

The students' passionate public statement outlined what they claim amounts to an entire academic year of constructed obfuscation, consistent question-dodging, wildly inconsistent communication, and blatant disrespect from program administrators. The basic issue is that the program and support that they were promised during recruitment, which included a tuition-free second year with a teaching assistantship and cash award, turned out to be what they describe as a “classic bait-and-switch."

Frances Stark, an artist who was a tenured faculty member, resigned from the program December of 2014, citing the administration's “lack of transparency or ethical behavior."

Screengrab of the Instagram feed of Frances Stark.

It's All too Familiar

Having served on the faculty member of multiple post-secondary art schools including Virginia Commonwealth University and Pacific Northwest College of Art (PNCA), and having a considerable amount of arts education administrative experience at PNCA and New York University, I find all this depressingly familiar.

Leading the accused USC administration is Roski dean Erica Muhl, appointed in May 2013 despite virtually no actual relationship to contemporary art (see USC Roski Dean Denies Accusations by Students Who Dropped Out in Protest). In fact, it was Muhl who, amongst other administrators, championed changing the name of the school from Roski School of Fine Arts to Roski School of Art and Design just months after her appointment to the position of Dean, calling this a “subtle but momentous shift." Momentous, yes. But subtle? Hardly.

Artists, by and large, think designers and start-up people are tools because, by and large, designers and start-up people are tools. I stand by that 100%—you can “user experience design" that on my headstone after cancer “disrupts" my “engagement" with existence.

What's possibly even more troubling about Muhl's relationship to the art students is that she is founding executive director of the USC Iovine and Young Academy for Arts, Technology, and the Business of Innovation, the start-up-themed pedagogic collaboration between USC and $70 million of Jimmy Iovine's and Dr. Dre's money. The academy is technically a different school than Roski, though Roski's site directly links to it, and, since Muhl herself has been designated an upper administrator of both, one has to question its impact on the fine arts department.

USC claims the Iovine and Young Academy is “an environment for those rare undergraduate students whose interests span fields such as marketing, business entrepreneurship, computer science and engineering, audio and visual design, and the arts." Please stop saying “the arts," you tech-humping poseurs. It's my opinion that any administrator comfortable with having job titles that include Professor of Art and Founding Executive Director of anything with “innovation" in the title needs to take a day off, have a cheeseburger, and do a little “me" work.

To study art is to learn to think critically, actually critically, not the way the Iovine and Young Academy uses the word. It's not about the sophomoric buzzword “disruption," it's about the actual disrupting of one's own social conditioning through the development of visual literacy and a profound, sometimes very upsetting, understanding of the political, social, and cultural paradoxes present in culture.

In fine art, innovation means pushing oneself beyond aesthetic tropes and posing what are often extremely uncomfortable questions. It has nothing to do with innovating the way corporations can use metrics and data to monetize the social behaviors of everyday people. Sure, there are plenty of artists who are cash-hungry, capitalist pigs. But at least when I suffer through listening to Jeff Koons give an interview I don't hear the hell-spawned fucking information-incubus that I do every time Zuckerberg opens his volatile, poke-inventing mouth.

Art School, Disrupted

Following the students' May 15 open letter, USC Roski's administration quickly released its own public statement attempting to discredit the students' accusations. The students responded with a new document, theUSC Roski Drop-Out Fact Sheet. While the administration's communications used vague and unconvincing arguments, the students' annotated response is clear and provides formal documents from USC as evidence supporting their claims of deliberate deceit.

I interviewed the USC Seven collectively via email for this article, and their response to the obsession with start-up language now favored by USC is barbed and astute:

Tethering an entire program with an industrial design focus to a trendy theory of “disruption" seems misguided and overall shortsighted. The marketing of the Academy as a place of innovation and conceptual thinking all happens against the backdrop of an administration that is hostile to critique and dissent, and a school where faculty is mistreated, maligned and intimidated.

When cultural institutions recklessly adopt the language and values of start-up culture (or the shallow world of design) in an attempt to seem current, their constituencies suffer. But the effects aren't limited to art-viewing audiences or student populations.

I also contacted writer Michael Pepi, who has extensively covered andtaught classes on the complicated relationship between contemporary art and the tech sector, to ask his opinion about initiatives like the Iovine and Young Academy at USC. He said:

It's no secret that donors and other groups that exert control over cultural institutions have a sort of ideological stamp on those structures. The university and the museum are little more than organs for the values of the ruling class, or more directly, the state. But today it is more complex, since for the first time the new “robber barons" have a distinctly anti-intellectual bent, believing that private sector value creation has an educational worth to society, or that blind worship of “disruptive" innovation somehow stands in as an alternative (or replacement) for creativity and personal development. The shift that is evidenced by the Iovine & Young program is only the beginning. Institutions of higher education, in basically any discipline, are relied upon to train critical thinkers able to stand outside something like the new gold rush we're seeing in Silicon Valley, not follow the hype cycle fomented by a cheerleading press.

As USC's administration focuses on growing a program that sounds practically antithetical to an art education, they're also throwing the Roski students under the bus. “These [MFA] students would have received a financial package worth at least 90 percent of tuition costs in scholarships and teaching assistantships," Muhl's letter from May 15th claimed. Not only is that factually false, it also conveniently disregards the costs incurred in addition to tuition fees. One need only examine the “Funding" section of the students' fact sheet to see how the administration is spinning this.

Formal communications from Penelope Jones, assistant dean for student affairs, and then-MFA director A.L. Steiner in April 2014 both clearly state that they'd be assured a paid TA position before they entered the program. By the spring 2015, the end of their first year at USC, the administration sent a contradictory document telling them that for 2015-16, they'd “authorized faculty to prioritize awarding of TA-ships to qualified second-year MFA applicants."

Even if it's more likely than not that an MFA student would get a TA position and cash award in their second year, it's absolutely not a guarantee. According to USC's own financial aid calculations, if students didn't receive the paid TA position that they were promised, their debt at the end of two years for school and living costs at “one of the most generously funded programs in the country" would likely be $75,252.40.

How Does Roski Solve a Problem Like A.L. Steiner?

It gets messier.

Artist A.L. Steiner, who recruited these students as MFA director and was a full-time faculty member at USC Roski until very recently, told me via email:

In the spring 2015 semester, the seven first-year MFA students—who were recruited during my Directorship [in 2014]—were told by Roski's administration that their funding promises, faculty and curricular offerings were changing, in advance of this cohort's 2016 graduation. As you know, the students released a detailed statement regarding these matters. On May 13, 2015, Muhl informed me that she was declining to renew my one-year contract, which was ending on May 15, 2015. I'm the only full-time non-tenure track Roski professor whose renewal was declined.

Steiner is a respected visual artist with an active exhibition record whose work is in collections including New York's Museum of Modern Art. She is a co-founder of Working Artists in the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E), a group that advocates for appropriate compensation for artistic labor. She has demonstrated a real, energetic dedication to education. At Roski, she was the only faculty member tapped to teach in the MFA program as well as the critical studies, intermedia, and photography programs. USC, or any program, should feel privileged to call her faculty.

Not renewing Steiner's contract seems like a powerful way for Muhl's office to intimidate other faculty. Steiner had voluntarily stepped down from her position as MFA director in the fall of 2014 (and was not replaced, the USC dropouts complain), but, as she describes it, only for personal reasons. Her father had died, she told me, and she wanted to focus on teaching instead of her administrative load.

Amidst increasing media heat, Muhl released a follow-up statement on May 21. After claiming to respect the students' decision and their strong feelings on the issue, she says, “We honored in every respect the 2014 offer letters sent to them by the school," then goes on to say that she “understand[s] that the students found some of the school's other communications confusing or unclear, and as dean [she has] already taken steps to correct those shortcomings."

What “other communications"? Does she mean the aforementioned official letters the students received from Steiner and Penelope Jones? Because those two letters seem pretty clear to me. The students were promised TA positions, a tuition-free year of study, and a cash award; to indicate that those letters confused the students is patronizing, if not entirely offensive.

The part that raises a red flag for me is her most recent letter's closing. In a charade of generosity, she indicates that she has not recorded their withdrawal, opting instead to grant each of them a two-year leave of absence with the option to re-enroll.

At first glance, it may seem like she's left the door open for further conversation. But that's bullshit. How can a dean refuse to let you drop out of college? This granting of a leave of absence reeks of an accounting scheme. Judging by a new letter released by the students on Thursday the 28th, it appears that they've come to the same conclusion.

The time I've spent working in the administrations at private art schools leads me to be highly suspicious of what's behind the school's latest correspondence. I believe that Muhl is attempting to keep her student population numbers at what's expected. Students who are on a leave of absence can still be counted as students, while those who have withdrawn cannot.

Academic deans, no matter how autonomous they may seem, do not operate in a vacuum. If it's Muhl who is orchestrating this scheme, it's quite possibly with a stamp of approval from provost Michael Quick and president Max Nikias, both of whom are likely pressuring her to keep, at the very least, some of the seven students who have dropped out. Administrations project anticipated tuition income for the following year and budget accordingly.

When USC opted to make changes to the funding promises and curriculum, including potential tuition dollars from students who didn't get a now “competitive" TAship, I suspect they mistakenly assumed that the students wouldn't have the audacity to actually collectively drop out. One or two maybe, but all seven? That was a hell of a gamble.

The students said much of the same in their original letter, stating, “Perhaps the University imagined that we would suffer any amount of lies, manipulations, and mistreatment for those shiny degrees." It's not easy to personally justify dropping out after going into debt and working so hard, no matter how awful the environment.

The school is now going to strange lengths to try to convince some of them to stay enrolled, despite the new policies and potential tuition costs, because any amount of income is still income. Simply honoring the original offers would have kept them in school, and at least avoided this public relations nightmare. It's a little sadistic, but I'm getting a real kick out of imagining the conversations about all of this between USC Roski's administration and the MFA class they've just recruited to begin this fall.

Unlike anything coming out of Muhl's office to the public, the students' final words to me over email highlight their thoughtful and realistic perspective on what happened this year at USC:

We all attended USC with the professional expectation that the financial promises made to us were specifically budgeted for us during our time at the University. We understand that department budgets change, especially for schools that have just secured a $70m donation, but we expected the financial changes would be made with respect for the obligations they already had promised.

Start-Up Art School

It's difficult, after hearing this story, to maintain any optimism about the future of higher art education. From the Cooper Union debacle (seeScandal Erupts as New York Attorney General Investigates Cooper Union for Shady Financial Dealings) to the USC Roski fiasco, it's demoralizing to hear how disconnected art school administrations are from what should be their mission: serving their students.

Frighteningly, the adoption of start-up mentalities that value quantitative data over qualitative learning may become the norm. And it's no secret at all that the rapid expansion of administrative staffs at art schools is a major cause of the rise in tuition. For a heavy take on how tuition dollars at colleges in general are spent, I recommend viewing Andrew Rossi's 2014 documentary The Ivory Tower.

Still, let's not forget that there is still power in action. The USC Seven intends to maintain their cohort and produce an exhibition. The students will continue to learn from one another, which is how artists learn best. Indeed, sometimes we get a glimmer of hope, like when a group of students stand up for themselves and refuse to take any more shit.