City College News

Media Credit: Andrea Cole Paul Mascottie with a student

This past month, MCTC president Phil Davis delivered an address on the state's staggering budget deficit, and the effects that deficit will have at MCTC. The announced reductions were devastating. "The significant loss in state funds will produce a fundamental shift in the range of programs and services," Davis said.

Translation: those "non-essential" classes (and teachers) you've enjoyed here? They're either in serious jeopardy, or gone already. "Even programs with a long and valued tradition may need to be altered or eliminated," Davis continued. Gulp.

So just when the recession is driving enrollment through the roof, layoffs begin. Right as the state's unemployment percentage grows (from 3.8% in 2006 to 8.3% in 2009), budget constraints force the elimination of most of our trade programs.

When did our world flip upside down? How're we supposed to make sense of the complicated forces that brought about this terrifying job market? Which "essential" teacher remains to explain this mess? Well, you could do a lot worse than enrolling in one of Paul Mascotti's classes. He's a Doctor of economics, and, more importantly, has kept his job for forty years.

Paul Mascotti is not your usual tenured professor, passing his last few years leisurely before the retirement checks kick in. He's a former scuba instructor, who taught skiing before becoming a full-time professor. He rides a motorcycle, loves European soccer, and bears an uncanny resemblance to cowboy actor Bruce Dern. His teaching style could best be described as calculus meets stand-up comedy. An average lecture drifts from a discussion of marginal revenue production to a "true story" of coming in fifty-first in People magazine's 50 sexiest men list.

"Any dope can make a thing more difficult," Mascotti told CCN. "The trick is to make things more understandable."

And that trick has become a bit more challenging after the seismic events that rocked the economy last fall. After banks began to fail and the federal government started spending billions on bailouts, interest in education explaining this maze of economic information is, to use a stock market term, booming.

"The questions and the interest are definitely up," Mascotti said. "But that's a dilemma too, because you can't talk about economic problems from an economic perspective until you actually do a little economics. That'd be like teaching a baseball class, and teaching the suicide squeeze on day one."

But the rapid pace of economic change right now makes pacing the schedule nearly impossible. "Things are always changing in the economy. Sometimes week-to-week. Sometimes things change from Tuesday to Thursday."

Students have been peppering him with questions all semester long. Most of them a variation of "are things really as scary as the experts are saying?" His answer is not reassuring. "Maybe even scarier." Once freed to talk about the specifics of the recession, Dr. Mascotti's opinions come fast and informed: "There are still those that say 'let the market handle it, deregulate.' Understand, we used have an economy of millions of small, competing, independent, firms. We now see two or three major players in almost every market. I don't think we have the competitive market that allows it to be unregulated. I'm a little nervous about that. If the bullies start pushing people around without referees, we might have a mess. It may not be self-regulating."

But this crisis has also presented educational opportunity. Students seem energized- grasping the everyday importance of these formerly esoteric ideas. "I want students to know, it really does affect you. It really does impact you. It really is important to you. It's not just another course you have to take. This counts." And for a man with forty years of teaching under his belt, hard-earned retirement benefits just waiting to be cashed out, and a million exotic hobbies outside of work, maybe this crisis has energized him as well. Perhaps the pull of sunny days spent on his bike, or planning trips to Italy with his wife would be enough to make a man want to walk away from the job. Or perhaps not. At age sixty-five, a proud father and grandfather, Mascotti isn't going anywhere. "I don't know what I'd do without it [teaching]. There is plenty of time for other pursuits during summer vacation.

For a guy who grew up under the long shadow of the great depression in the dried-up mining towns of Northern Michigan, perhaps there's no such thing as slowing down. When I asked him if he could teach until he's eighty-five, he laughed: "I hope so." "I know it sounds corny, but every time I walk through the skyway I feel pumped up." And, increasingly, more and more students have been pumped up to attend his classes. With discussions ranging from monetary policy to analyzing the cost-benefit of the Vikings signing Brett Favre, the micro and macroeconomic courses at MCTC have never been more vital- or more fun.

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