what really happens to anyone?

"Tuition is $31,385 a year; meanwhile, Kovalik said Vojtko earned less than $25,000 from teaching eight classes a year. And though Vojtko had worked at the university for 25 years, when she was let go, she wasn’t entitled to severance pay, let alone a pension. Her situation seemed to embody everything that is wrong with the economics of higher education."

Read more of this article from Slate.

Czech Lit in PA

I try to be modest and full of verve and self-deprecatory wit, and yet, if someone in Steeler Country doesn't fly me in on a private jet soon, whereupon I should be fed meats and starches and then led through the Prague Writers Festival on my own private donkey and greeted with flowers and asked to sign books, yours and mine of course, I'm going to feel snubbed, as if the Reigning King of Literary Pennsylvania's Slovak Nation has not been properly recognized (and don't give me that bull about Allen Ginsberg in 1965 or social-justice Czechs who worked in and wrote about steel mills and such, great uncles who "Slav-ed" so I could teach school and all that).