Laboring away

Today is Labor Day – a day when we reflect upon the accomplishments of the common person, and America’s workers take a much-deserved break from their toils. Around the country, hard-working men and women are grilling burgers or going to sales at K-Mart or, uh, taking advantage of their last opportunity to wear white shoes.\nThat is, unless they write opinion columns for the Indiana Daily Student, which doesn’t give us the day off. \nYes, for us it’s just another workday: slaving away in a dark, dank room for 19 hours straight, the crack of the editor’s cat-of-nine-tails, getting paid in cast-off United Nations humanitarian aid rations, cranking out opinions for the today’s demanding media-savvy consumer ... \nWell, someone has to stand up and say something! Someone has to fight for our rights! So today, I’m laying down my burden. I’m taking my day off. Nope, today, I’m not writing a column – consequences be damned!\nFor example, I’m not going to scan the Chronicle of Higher Education looking for news about what’s happening at colleges around the country. And I’m not going to comment on the story they posted Friday about how president Glenn Poshard of Southern Illinois University is facing accusations that he plagiarized material in his 1984 dissertation. On any other day, I might have highlighted this as an example for IU students of the fact that cheating will always catch up to you and noted all the times that I have caught people plagiarizing in the course of my work as an instructor. I might even have said that at the very least you should stop copying from Wikipedia because it’s very easy to catch. But I’m not going to do it. Nope, not going to say a thing.\nNor will I mention another cautionary tale for IU students in Sunday’s New York Times about exploitative practices by the private student loan industry, or cite the Times’ statistic about student debt more than doubling in the past decade, or point the finger accusingly at state governments (and taxpayers) that seem to be ignoring their duty to help provide an affordable college education. Perhaps I might have qualified this opinion by saying that I’m generally a very market-oriented capitalist (except when casting myself as a downtrodden member of the proletariat serves my interests), but highlighted that even Adam Smith supported state-sponsored education as being a public good that the market could not provide at optimal efficiency. I won’t, though.\nAnd, unlike 60-75 percent of opinion columnists in the free world, I won’t find something to say about Idaho’s Sen. Larry Craig resigning after getting busted for soliciting a plainclothes police officer in a Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport men’s room because … well actually, because it’s just another “out-the-conservative” sex scandal, and I find it hard to care. But I still won’t write about it.\nYes, let my editors look upon this empty space where a column should be and gnash their teeth in anger. That will teach them the value of Labor Day.