1) There were no “push” factors in my decision. I taught architecture full-time at U. of Ark and made about $30,000 a year. I liked them and they like me. Teaching architecture (20 contact hours per week plus all the usual stuff) didn’t allow much time for research.

2) I needed to live in Rome to do the research – and no school will give a faculty member several years off to do research. I really did need to quit my day job.

3) I had to learn Italian. Oh, and I don’t have a PhD. Nor do I have a trust fund, etc.

4) The book is one part of an on-going web project which is a history of water infrastructure and urban development in Rome from Romulus and Remus to the present day. The web project has been public since 1999 by U of Virginia.

5) It took about 3 years to write the book. I also had to learn how to write well. How many architects know how to do that?

6) I would love all the perks that come with a real job and I miss not having them.

7) If I lived in a town of 30,000 (Fayetteville was about 45,000 when I left) I could live on a lot less money. But I would still have to go to Rome to do my research.

8) Some of my friends are professors and/or architects. Many of the professors actually make more than the architects. I know several former academics who make hefty salaries.

9) When I teach, I teach my specialty = urban development, urban history, infrastructure history, design studios, etc. Since I don’t have a PhD I can only teach in an architecture school – however I should point out that for about the last 15 years or so most programs only hire Phd’s, for tenure-track positions, even to teach design studio.

Thanks for your interest. Please look at my book if you are interested in the subject “The Waters of Rome: Aqueducts, Fountains, and the Birth of the Baroque City.” I think my time was well spent.

Otherwise, yes, exactly what you said. Dems need to stop letting others frame the story.

The stories from the representatives that you linked were very intense and affective. I’d like to hope they were also effective but with these ideologues on the opposite side, devoted to thinking of women as chattel? I doubt it.

Let us remind people how horrific the outcomes were in the days of old and how they still are now since so many American women are effectively without access to reproductive health services and abortions. What affects them also spills over to Canada since we especially rely on the U.S. as a provider of late-term (very specialized) care although we should think about that dangerous dependency!

(Not that these facts necessarily make any difference, just thought I’d throw them out there.)

We’ve been rhetorically reduced to ”welfare queens” “sucking at the public teat” as though our work has no value, as though we’re not paying our freight, and as though we are not citizens of the body politic.

This is very predictable behavior of the greedy ignorant emotional and intellectual slobs exploited by far-right-wing propaganda. The things the government does for *them* and that they can see very clearly with their own eyes despite their gross ignorance and cognitive deficits–such as pave roads, pay for and run police and fire departments, pay for and run the military, etc–are “essential government services” that should never be cut. The things that the government does for *other people*, or whose benefits even to themselves they are too fucken irredeemably pig-ignorant to be aware of (this is where education and research come in), are “sucking at the public teat”.