Swimming with the student loan sharks

Swimming with the student loan sharks

I'm from a very unhappy medium in the lower middle class. As an electrician my mom made just enough money to disqualify me for a Pell Grant, but nowhere near enough to fill the gap between scholarships and tuition at Brandeis University. The "solution" was $50,000 in loans.

The first monthly payment on my Perkins Loan hit just after I moved to New York, and was equal to roughly all my money. The kicker: I received the bill several days after it was due. I'd just moved, and their confusion as to my whereabouts was perfectly reasonable. It was still terrifying, but nothing seemed amiss. The obvious solution would be to get in touch with Campus Partners, the company in charge of the loan, to explain my situation and get everything squared away. That should be easy enough...if Campus Parners answered their phones.

Or, after taking half an hour to answer their phones, they didn't hang up.

Or if their phone operators weren't specifically instructed to obscure and omit relevant information, even when specifically and repeatedly asked.

Or if they made it possible to get in touch with someone with any authority.

Or if they had an email address, or any other way to get in touch with them online.

After several days of calling Campus Partners despite their determined resistance, I learned that I could submit a forbearance request. In paper. No electronic documents allowed, even though an electronic document would be far quicker and easier for everyone. Apparently Campus Partners was only willing to process urgent legal documents in the least efficient form possible, which seemed to match their “delay and ignore” M.O. just fine.

Putting together this forbearance application took time. It required documentation of income, which is hard to pull together when you've just moved twice in a single month and commute four hours a day day. It also required a printer, which I didn't have.

It took a few weeks to put this form together, but just as I was about to send it - while at the post office, just before I sealed the envelope - Brandeis financial services called me and told me I could submit it electronically, straight to them. When I mentioned Campus Partners' behavior to them, they were concerned, and said they'd look into it.

Brandeis also told me it might be a good idea to consolidate my loans, to which I replied, "Huh?" Campus Partners had left out the fact that I could mash my Perkins Loan together with my Stafford Loan (whose monthly payments were based on my income) so I wouldn't have to pay extra money each month. In short, I’d be home free, at least in the short term.

After sending out the forbearance application and the loan consolidation request, I felt a weight lift off my chest, followed immediately by suspicion. If Brandeis could accept the form electronically at a moment's notice, why did Campus Partners need a hardcopy and several weeks to process it?

                       

Ah well, it wasn’t my problem. My forms were in, and I was set, right? Right.

About three weeks later, I got another letter from Campus Partners. Looking at the envelope, I nodded. This would be the confirmation that they'd received and processed my documents. Still nodding, still smiling, I tore open the envelope to find a...

                                                 

final demand letter?

I blinked and read it again. No, it definitely said "FINAL DEMAND LETTER", and it was definitely threatening to send my loan to a collections agency if I didn't pay up now.

After freaking out for ten minutes, I contacted Campus Partners to check if they'd received the form I sent two weeks ago. They said they hadn't. I then called my mom, Brandeis's financial department, and my boss, looking for some sort of way out of this. I also contacted an old mentor of mine, who mentioned that student loan servicers have a shady reputation, and that this one seemed shadier than most.

That put me on edge. Since they'd started sending me letters in May, Campus Partners' correspondence had been continually late. Feeling a bit sick, I took a closer look at the letter, and more importantly, at its envelope.

 

Dated July 12th...

...and postmarked July 23rd.

As you can see, the letter is dated July 12^th, but postmarked July 23^rd. For some reason, Campus Partners delayed urgent correspondence by 11 days, and deliberately sending my loan into collections seems the only motive for doing so.

In the past three months, I've seen Campus Partners make themselves difficult to contact, obscure relevant information, deceive both me and Brandeis University, fail to acknowledge receipt of forms, and send forms late to prevent me from responding.

I was lucky. When I spoke to Brandeis again, I learned they'd already pushed through their forms, and I was in the clear. But what if I weren't? What if someone else, dealing with this company, hadn't kept hammering at their phones for weeks on end? What if their forms got stuck in the mail? What if Brandeis hadn't picked the exact right moment to call? I don’t want to think of that.

And frankly, I shouldn’t have to. If our education and our livelihoods depend on the good faith and credit of student loan servicers, it is Brandeis’s responsibility to ensure that we can rely on them. It is unconscionable that this university deals with a company that deceives and robs those students it should aid and protect. Brandeis needs to vet its student loan servicers carefully and actively monitor their behavior to prevent this sort of abuse.

         

Campus Partners is a loan shark in graduation robes. You shouldn't have to with them, and Brandeis University shouldn’t make you.

An abridged version of this story has been published on the Brandeis Hoot.

                                                                                        

On Yom Kippur

With the help of several wonderful friends, I think I've finally been able to understand and parse the meaning of Yom Kippur and Judaism this year. It’s been wonderful and painful and enlightening, and I feel I’ve become a better person, a better version of myself, for it.

Have I?

I've been striving to understand the holiday through action: reading through the prayers in full even if i don't understand or agree with them, finding small ways to do good, to do better. But I've failed. That doesn't mean it was pointless. But I have failed.

I have not apologized to those I've wronged. I've been callous to friends and family, taking their presence and their love for granted. I have not forced myself to confront my own behavior, to better it.

The last of those, the least, I can make right.

When I graduated college, I had to move back home. And I hated it. Despite my mom's efforts to compromise, to support me, to help me be comfortable, I felt stuck, imprisoned. Alone, uprooted from the community I built with my friends in college, lost.

I wasn't wrong for feeling that way. Isolation brought out the worst in me: my loneliness, my moodiness, my tendency to view others as resources. I could feel myself becoming a worse person, and my awareness just made me hate it that much more. If I wanted to be the person I wanted to be, I would have to get back to where I belonged.

With little else to do, I worked toward that obsessively. In the name of keeping myself moving forward, I blinded myself to everything but my goals. That I eventually succeeded does not justify my behavior at the time. I didn't think about my past, and I was careless for the consequences of my actions in the present.

I abandoned friendships and burnt bridges. I was callous and distant to those around me. I relied too much of the kindness and support of a few friends without a thought for their own needs. I may not have hurt them, but I did take advantage of their generosity.

When you start to see someone as a hero, it's easy to forget they're human. It's easy to forget they need care too.

I'm sorry.

I can't fix the way I acted last year, but this year, I will be better. Where I once ran from others, I will stand by them. Where I once burnt bridges, I will build them. Where I once took love, I will give it.

I will fail, of course. I understand this. But if I can read this post a year from now and say honestly that I am a better person than I was today...

...well, that's worth something.

Matt Stover's Test of Metal puts us at the labyrinth's heart

I've played Magic: the Gathering since I was pretty young, but I make a point of not reading the licensed tie-in novels. To put it bluntly, they're not very good; at best, a guilty pleasure. In fact, I probably wouldn't have opened Test of Metal at all if not for one small detail: Matt Stover's name on the cover. A long time ago in a town far, far away, I read his novelization of Star Wars Episode III, and found it far better than the actual movie. Okay, I thought. This could be worth my time.

And it was.

Under Matt Stover's hand, what could have easily been Another Stupid Contract Novel becomes a genuinely deep discussion of how power stifles understanding and how trial and insight can help us become the best versions of ourselves. It’s about changing and becoming the person you need to be, and then, when that person is no longer the right person, becoming again.

Particularly brilliant is its labyrinth motif. There's much discussion of their design and purpose, but the true stroke of genius is Stover's careful eye toward structure. Test of Metal isn't just about labyrinths; it is a labyrinth, circling around and around until we end at the middle: the center, the goal, the answer. And like our antihero Tezzeret, we you don’t learn the solution so much as we become the person at the center, the person who understands themselves and the nature of the puzzle.

In a labyrinth, power is weakness, because having power makes us impatient, simple, direct. Power entices us to cut straight to the goal…but a labyrinth has no goal. There is no prize, no treasure at the center; the treasure is who you become by following its path. The center isn't a destination, it's just a signpost marking the end of the journey. The journey is the trial, and the trial is its own reward.

Even if you don't play Magic, I'd pick up this book. Some unfortunate casual sexism aside, Stover has crafted in Test of Metal a work of keen insight into the nature of human growth and progression.

Read it once to reach the center, to understand the puzzle. Then read it again

Speak again the ancient oaths: Trauma, recovery, and the Stormlight Archive

"It is the nature of the magic. A broken soul has cracks into which something else can be fit. Surgebindings, the powers of creation themselves; they can brace a broken soul, but they can also widen its fissures." - from the back cover of Words of Radiance, second book of Brandon Sanderson's Stormlight Archive

Brandon Sanderson is known widely for works of epic fantasy with well-explored, almost scientific systems of magic. His Stormlight Archive, doesn't break the formula, but it does bend it with Surgebinding, a highly personal and human system that grants characters powers based on their personalities and ideals.

Using magic to literalize a character's other traits as a form of power is a common trope in fantasy, and I'm a big fan of it. It allows the writer to present the supernatural in an insightful and deeply human way, turning what might otherwise be a flashy action sequence into commentary on its characters without being any less thrilling. It's a good technique, and I've seen it done well in a lot of works.

Even by those standards, the magic of the Stormlight Archive is something special. Only characters who've undergone exceptional trauma and started on the path to recovery can become Surgebinders, and the exact form that their recovery takes determines what powers they gain.

In other words, Surgebinding literalizes recovery from trauma. That's more than good technique on Sanderson's part. That's wisdom.

As Surgebinders recover and grow, their powers increase; if they slide backward, or stop growing, or grow into something harmful to those around them, their powers fade or even vanish. Recovery isn't an event, it's a process, and it never takes the same form for two different people. One may cope and advance by finding strength in oaths and loyalty, another in exploring the nature of truth and lies.

Nobody is ever the same person they were before trauma; to survive it we must to change and adapt, and continue changing and adapting. Trauma hunts us down out of the past, tries to pull us back, break us again, and to fight it we develop, discover, and grow into something new. That we've been hurt is no excuse to stop growing. People change, or they die.

Life before death.

Growth is risky. Change is risky. Even if this new form is what we need, it may be toxic, something stifling, or even dangerous to those around us. Recovery is power. That we've gone through hell to gain that power is no excuse for abusing it. It's our responsibility to ensure that we develop in a way that protects and nurtures those around us, that the power we gain from recovery lifts up those around us instead of strangling them. And that takes a kind of power of its own.

Strength before weakness.

Recovery isn't an event; it's a process, and a struggle, and though we might be past our darkest moments, that struggle is hard. And it doesn't end. We keep changing, we keep growing, we keep advancing, though there's no goal in sight, no end to that work. That we can't see the end of our path, that we will never truly grow past our trauma, is no excuse to stop growing. All we can do is be the best we can, and keep moving.

Journey before destination.

As humans have the drive, the imperative, the responsibility to grow, to recover from our trauma and to ensure that our growth shapes us into a form that helps those around us. Sanderson is wise to recognize that, and genius to present it like this.

The price of standing up

Last Thursday, I attended my first protest.

You might have heard about it on the news, when several thousand people marched from Union Square to Times Square to protest the police brutality in Ferguson.

Organized by word of mouth and social media, the protest was described as a silent vigil in Union Square. At 7:00 it got of to a confused start: whatever it was, the event wasn't a silent vigil, and the moderately-sized crowd didn't quite seem to know what to do with itself. Most talked and milled around, some stood silently, and a few activists, mostly black, chanted: Hands up, don't shoot and No justice, no peace. I didn't join in; I'm white, and I wasn't sure it was my place. The feeling seemed pretty common among the white attendees; while we definitely wanted to support the activists, we weren't quite sure how to do it.

Then crowd shifted: someone had started moving, and the rest moved to follow. They spread out and sped up, and the activists led their chants like a conductor leads an orchestra, raising them, using their footsteps like a metronome.

For thirty blocks we marched like that, right through traffic down the middle of Broadway all the way to Times Square. We held our arms up until they were sore and shouted until our throats hurt. The white supporters gradually figured out what to do, and started to lead chants when the black activists grew tired.

And people joined.

A lot of people.

Just around dusk, right in the middle of Times Square, next to the bright blue NYPD station, the march ground to a halt.

Turns out the police had blocked us. After about ten few minutes they let us move again, funneling us up to the northern part of Times Square...

...where they blocked us again.

With the march stopped, the chants became quieter. The black activists tried to keep them alive; a few of the white supporters helped out. (I joined in as best I could, but my throat was raw.) But without the movement of marching, the energy wasn't there.





About twenty minutes later, the police let us go, under a few conditions. We had to walk in a narrow line on the sidewalk, head south out of Times Square, then go west. The activists warned that this was a tactic to split us apart; we had to stick together. And we followed them westward, toward Port Authority, the police at our side every step of the way. We walked right down the center of the street, hands up, screaming, then turned a corner...

...right into a wall of police vans.

Once we were bottled up against their blockade, they surrounded us...

...pushed us together, and backed us up against the sidewalk.

Ten minutes later, they hadn't made any indication they intended to let us move. In the crowd, people started passing out a phone number: the National Lawyers' Guild. "Write it on your arm," they said. "If the cops take us in, they'll take everything you have."



I felt exhilarated. I was doing something important! We were making noise, forcing people to pay attention to our outrage with the behavior of the our police. This meant something, and I was proud to be part of it.

Then I looked around.

The black men and women around me were definitely excited, but not exhilarated. They made jokes at the police, they chanted, but they were not exhilarated. You don't feel exhilarated with your life on the line. You feel terrified.

Unlike me, they had something to lose here.

That was the main difference between the white protesters (myself included) and the black ones. For the white protesters, tearing down this vicious and brutal system that supports these racist, overarmed, hyperaggressive police was an important cause, and we were proud to do our part. But what did we have to lose if things went bad? We were white. The police wouldn't really hurt us. We'd get a few bruises, a night in the precinct, a reprimand at most.

For the black protesters, this this was their lives. And to try and raise their head, to stand up and force America to acknowledge them as more than animals, they risked beatings, jail time, and death at the hands of the police. And they still stood up. And more than that, they led others to stand with them.

The police kept us penned in at the side of the street for about half an hour. Toward the end of it, they started making what seemed like random arrests. All were black men. At that point a white protester in the crowd suggested that we provoke the police into arresting us illegally so we could sue.

Nobody said anything to him. The scorn was enough.

It's easy to think of supporting the unprivileged as a game when you have nothing to lose from doing it. White people, straight people, cisgendered men - people like me - who want to do their part have to remember that. Privilege is about not having to worry about things have other people afraid for their lives. When we stand up for those less privileged, we always risk less than they do. Remember that.

Respect that. Respect their wishes. Stand with them when they need you, and support them when they want to stand alone.

The city ain't a single block: the problem of place in Legend of Korra S1

Look. I know the first season of Avatar: The Legend of Korra was kind of a train wreck. This is old news. A slew of pacing problems compounded with a perfectly misplaced love triangle, and the result was an incoherent mess that didn't address its own central theme of class-based oppression and retribution. That's old news, but it's still there, like a scab that never quite got clean.

So let's pick at it.

Avatar: The Last Airbender was, among other things, a show about travel. Every episode had us in a different part of the world, with new and magnificent sights to see and explore, and that wonder of exploration suffused the show right until the end. A new episode of Avatar promised to take us somewhere fresh and new, or later on, to return to an old, familiar place changed by war.

The first few episodes of Legend of Korra seemed to follow up on that promise. The first few episodes introduce us to Republic City, a booming industrial metropolis dripping with 1880s New York nostalgia. Though everything was much closer together than before, the feeling was the same. There were places to explore! People to meet! Adventures to be had!

And then it stopped.

There were still adventures going on, still new people to meet, but what had happened to that sense of wonder? Why did it suddenly feel like the city was just one big sandbox where one little building might as well be any other?

Because the show started treating it like that.

In real life, large cities are not monoliths. From neighborhood to neighborhood, block to block, architecture varies, income varies, culture varies. In its own way a city is as diverse as the wilderness of the original Avatar, just more compact. And, more to the point of Korra's central conflict, stratified by class.

By flattening out Republic City, making one neighborhood the same as the next, the first season of Korra fails to depict the unstable and stratified society on which its conflict rests. It's not the show's biggest fault, but with it comes the loss of that sense of exploration and wonder I miss so much from the original Avatar.

Just how bad is the Hobby Lobby decision? Let me count the ways...

In case you missed it, the Supreme Court of the United States of America just ruled that corporations have the right to dictate their employees' healthcare.

Under this ruling, corporations may claim that a medical procedure violates their religious beliefs and deny coverage for that sole reason. While I could go down the line and explain every reason why this ruling is cruel, abhorrent, idiotic, flings open the gates on a dozen slippery slopes, and invites an era of legislative chaos that would ripple through our legal, medical, and economic systems...

No. I'm going to explain them. You've probably seen every argument I present floating around the Internet in some form or another, many of them in a form more thorough, well-argued, and well-supported than I present here. I'm taking the other route. 

I'm going for quantity. 

There's nothing quite like that moment of horror as you see the sheer volume of reasons this ruling is terrible. Nothing quite like the sick feeling moments later as you realize the fractal nature of this case, that each reason encapsulates a hundred other problems that all stink just as badly as the whole.

So sit down and let me tell you how many ways this ruling is terrible.

To start, every single justice who ruled in favor of Hobby Lobby's "right" to not pay its female employees' healthcare costs is a man. This isn't quite as bad as the all-male Congressional panel on abortion of 2012, but it's representative of the same systemic problem. Americans have taken note of the Court's intransigence, and public confidence in it has sunk.

Hobby Lobby displays a history of raging hypocrisy on this case. While they refuse to cover any sort of reproductive care for women, they gladly pay for Viagra and vasectomies. Neither of these have any biological necessity, unlike women's reproductive care. The overall implication is that Hobby Lobby and the Supreme Court believe that men's pleasure trumps women's medical needs.

Also, Hobby Lobby is heavily invested in pharmaceutical companies which manufacture contraceptives, which undercuts the chain's claim to a sincere, principled belief that birth control is wrong. According to Hobby Lobby, contraception is wrong, unless it makes money for Hobby Lobby.

Also, it sources many of its goods from China, where forced abortions still happen.

As for the current Supreme Court? Well, the gentlemen who currently warm that bench have written a long and storied history of ignoring petty things like "science" or "evidence" if it would force them to ponder that things such as poverty or discrimination might exist. 

In the mind of this Court, we live in a world of Platonic ideals where worldly evidence need not tread. Arguments which appear plausible within the scope of the Court's white, male, wealthy, geriatric standard of scrutiny fly. Those which don't fall, evidence be damned. No amount of statistics and analysis and experts will ever stack up to the Court's casual observations of fields it doesn't understand, which is why it concluded that the Voting Rights Act is obsolete.

One of those fields, of course, is medicine, where the Court apparently believes employers should have control over its employees' treatments. While this ruling technically doesn't mean employers can dictate what their employees can and can't do with their bodies, due to the lethally high cost of healthcare in the United States, that is the precise result.

What happens if a female employee, denied coverage for contraceptives, can still afford them? Simple: she buys them out of pocket with money from her paycheck. In effect, the corporation is still paying for those contraceptives; it's just through a paycheck instead of an insurance plan. How can an employer dictate what employees can and can't do with one aspect of their compensation, but not another? Employment is not a sponsorship; once pay and benefits are disbursed, an employer has zero say over what the employee does with them. Except...now it does.

But fear not! Justice Alito, writing for the majority, reassures us that the government could just pick up the slack for employers who prefer not to pay for contraception. But then, what's to stop employers forcing taxpayers to subsidize benefits it doesn't care to provide? Would we have to subsidize religious employers who feel that women should be paid less than men? It's a distinct possibility.

Speaking of healthcare, let's talk about abortion. Let's talk about what it isn't. Hobby Lobby's case rested on the belief that contraceptives such as Plan B and IUDs cause abortion, which has this awkward detail of being completely false. Contraceptives are not abortion. Period. They only inhibit conception, just like the name says they do.

Not that the Supreme Court would bother itself with something as silly as verifiable medical fact. In its ruling, the Court concluded that it should privilege Hobby Lobby's false belief that contraceptives cause abortion over the FDA's fact-based definition when deciding the case. There's no real difference between claiming that contraceptives cause abortion and claiming that Tylenol does; both are false. But under this decision, "religious freedom" means you can define anything however you choose if you cover your ears and shout loudly enough.

By letting corporations use religious beliefs to claim exemptions from reality, we grant them a blank check to do whatever they want as long as they wrap it in a veneer of piety. This is quite the dilemma: either the Court can cede that it has given corporations implicit permission to do pretty much anything, or it can pick and choose which religious exemptions are valid and which aren't...which violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

If employers can dictate employees' healthcare under the banner of "freedom of religion", what is to stop them from using that same banner to dictate other behavior as well? As a Jew, could I ban my employees from eating pork? Could a Mormon boss say his employees can't drink? And these are mundane examples; Justice Ginsburg points out some far worse, and more plausible, scenarios. Under this ruling, a corporation could potentially could use its freedom of religion as a mandate to exclude its employees from any type of behavior, on or off the job.

And it's already begun.

The Court must have realized on some level the judicial chaos their ruling would cause, because it added  a few provisions to limit the decision's scope. The problem? Those limitations were little more than an afterthought, and their slapdash wording causes problems of its own.

First, the majority specified that its ruling only applies to closely held (not publicly traded) companies, but were really vague about their reasons for distinguishing the two. Weak reasoning like this leaves cracks in the ruling that a clever plaintiff could use to secure religious exemptions for publicly traded corporations as well.

Second, the Court claims that this ruling does not affect any medical treatments beyond contraception because...it doesn't. Alito doesn't actually provide a reason. He just wants you to take his word for it. And if your Christian Scientist boss refuses to cover your kidney transplant...well, good luck.

Those paltry limitations do little limit this ruling's scope. Beyond the judicial chaos the complexity of this ruling will cause, its sheer impact is vast. Closely-held corporations account for 90% of incorporated U.S. companies, and some of them are huge. What the Supreme Court describes as a narrow ruling is not in fact narrow at all.

EDIT: In fact, the Court has already backed off from those shaky claims of narrowness.

Alito's decision to limit the ruling to closely-held corporations is troubling not just for its content but its inconsistency: it implies that some, but not all, corporations are legally people, depending on certain criteria. This precedent could quite plausibly circle back on the definition of what a "person" is, and makes me dread the day when we decide that some, but not all, humans are legally people. Depending on certain criteria.

It's time to talk about one of the stickiest topics of this whole, sticky mess: the ascendant, toxic idea of corporate personhood. How can a corporation have religion? Does it attend church on Sundays? Does it pray? As an entity convened for the express purpose of profit, we have to assume that profit is always a corporation's Priority One. A corporation is a selfish beast by nature. I won't say that's right or wrong, but it's certainly not religious. For a corporation to claim favorable treatment for its "sincere religious belief" smacks of a really underhanded way to serve its Priority One.

The entire point of incorporation, a centerpiece of capitalism, is to separate person from power. This allows for a personal life separate from work, and also liberalizes capitalist societies in comparison with feudal ones. Under capitalism, the elites have power; under feudalism, the elites are power. If power and person are one, social mobility is unthinkable.

In the Hobby Lobby decision, the Supreme Court has granted that for-profit company, can be said to hold the religious beliefs of those who control it. They have in principle allowed that a corporation, a power structure, may merge with the individuals who control it.

They have in principle allowed a return to feudalism.

That scares me.