Tim Horton University and the enshitification of the academy

Pleased to report I’m down to buying just one print copy of the Globe & Mail per week, down from six. I still crave the page-turning, but I get my fix with the $8.40 Saturday edition. Rest of the week I read it online. Given the Farm Manager’s had an online account for over a year, this move was probably somewhat overdue. So just after 6 o’clock this morning I headed into town, picked up my Globe from the Korean Extortionist, grabbed a medium dark roast at Timmies, and settled in on a waterfront bench between the marina and the water treatment plant. You gotta admit Timmies is one of the few Canadian institutions that brings Canadians together instead of tearing them apart. True, I was put off when those Brazilian hedge-fund sharpies bought the brand, but that doesn’t seem to have diminished its appeal. As I was exiting the drive-thru I had to stop for a couple of Indigenous dudes walking by with Timmies cups. I had just got cozy on that waterfront bench when a carload of Indians (the other ones) gathered round a nearby picnic table, every one of them with a Timmies in hand. Oh Canada! But I digress. I usually head to the opinion section first. On the front page I see the headline “The Ghosts of Chicago.” Cambridge University professor of American history Andrew Preston has got a full-pager and then some doing a compare-and-contrast between the 1968 Democratic party convention in Chicago and the upcoming shindig next week. In my world that ‘68 convention is generally known as the “Chicago police riot,” but no matter. I watched it on TV. My dad was happy to see the police beating the crap out of the “hippies.” For me, that event sparked a life-long interest in anti-establishment politics. Preston, in his long-winded academic way, is analyzing the role of populism in 1968 vs next week’s convention. I was OK till I ran into this; Yet disaffected working class whites didn’t all turn to Nixon. Many instead turned to Wallace, who siphoned off enough votes from both Humphrey and Nixon – across the Sun Belt of the South and Southwest but also in the deindustrializing Rust Belt cities of Northeast and Midwest… That didn’t sound right to me. Far as I know, in ‘68 American heavy industry was alive and well. There were no deindustrializing Rust Belt cities in 1968. In my recollection, deindustrialization got going in the Reagan-Thatcher dawn of neoliberalism, and kicked into overdrive with the advent of “free trade.” So I did a little research. The term “Rustbelt” was coined during Walter Mondale’s presidential campaign in 1984. That’s 16 years after the ’68 Dem convention. American manufacturing employment peaked in ‘79. There clearly was no “Rust Belt” in ‘68. The other day one or another of the annual university rankings came out. The FM was pleased as could be that two of our five (both hers) have graduated Canada’s top-ranked school, U of T. That’s where Preston graduated too, and then arrived at Cambridge via Stanford and LSE. Cambridge is consistently ranked in the top five worldwide no matter what ranking outfit you look at. And Preston is so popular at Cambridge he’s not taking any more applicants to his Doctor Phil program, according to his University of Cambridge website. I, on the other hand, hold a B.A. from the University of Guelph, consistently ranked between the 450th and 600th best universities in the world, no matter what ranking outfit you look at. Academic standards clearly aren’t what they used to be. Maybe Tim Horton’s should start a university.