Parking Enforcement at the University of Texas at Austin

From 11 September 2023 until 16 January 2026, I was employed as a parking enforcement officer at the University of Texas (Austin). 

The absolute best part of the job was the occasional postings to the Pickle Research Center because the food was excellent; I worked alone; and the population there was even a little smarter than the community at the main campus. They made it easy to be lenient, helpful, and informative; and I could still issue ten citations on any day. 

On the main campus, I enjoyed the outreach tables
to give insulated drink mugs along with other merch and swag
to anyone who came up and asked a question.

This was my longest run of W-2 employment since 1991-1993 at Kawasaki Robotics USA, following 1973-1975 with Montgomery Ward & Co; both of those lasting 1 year and 50 weeks. My theory of labor value was informed by Harry Browne’s How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World (1973) and John Brunner’s The Shockwave Rider (1975). My time at Kawasaki, where I taught robot operations and programming, derived from having read (in 1989) William Gibson’s Neuromancer and Count Zero.

Job Description Summary

• Provides university parking services by enforcing University rules and regulations. 
• Ensures that parking regulations are enforced and assists the public with information, such as directions to buildings and offices. 
• Provides assistance to the public by giving parking directions and checking parking permits on vehicles entering the parking lots. 
• Directs flow of traffic and parking of cars. 
• Issues pass-through or visitor's permits when needed. Issues traffic and parking violation citations. 
• Acts as Relief Guard to perform a combination of kiosk guard duties and parking enforcement assistant (PEA) or ticket writer functions. 
• Performs preventative maintenance checks on vehicles. 
• Installs and removes immobilization devices. 
• Controls parking access to surface lots during special events and other university sponsored activities. 
• Resolves or refers parking issues as appropriate. 
• May provide security functions at Pickle Research Center (PRC) to include patrolling buildings and grounds on foot or in vehicles to check for prowlers, fires, water leaks, and general building security.  
• May report all irregularities, emergencies, or suspicious activity to the University Police Office. 
• May be required to rotate locations across campus, including satellite locations.  Other duties as assigned.
• WORKING CONDITIONS: Exposure to variable weather conditions and shift work with varying days off, occasional weekend and overtime.

Despite claiming to be a major research university and even after then-UT president Jay Hatzell declared academic year 2024-25 to be “The Year of AI” the societal dominance of the UT sports cartel is one of the reasons that I left. In our department, we wore UT blood orange tops on Fridays. It was allowed on other days but basic blue was always encouraged. During the football season, we were allowed to wear team jerseys and other UT-branded tops. I wore a “Texas Economics” t-shirt and was told that it did not meet standards because it had no collar. On a following Friday, I put a “Texas Science” t-shirt over a collared blood orange top and was told flat out by the manager who encouraged the football jerseys that this was not within the guidelines for dress. I replied, “It’s spirit day. We can wear UT gear.” His reply: “There are no spirit days.” The diminution of spirit was a constant problem for me.

I found people with a good sense of life at UT, for example at the Texas Science and Natural History Museum and the College of Fine Arts. I enjoyed interacting with them, even when writing citations for the students at the Sarah and Ernest Butler School of Music. When I volunteered at the Museum of Science everyone on the staff was enthusiastic, even when acknowledging the existence of unsolved problems at their desk. However, in the parking department eudaimonia was scarce.

This is how student athletes, especially football players, spend their NIL money. 

See recent college athlete valuations at Fox Sports here. 

Parking is like any other game: there are rules and penalties and everyone knows

what they are. The athletes enjoy being able to scoff at the fines 

so that in a community of 55,000 students and 22,000 staff and faculty

served by 13,000 parking spaces they can park wherever they want.

Athletes are given garage parking spaces as part of their scholarship payments. 

As one coach told me, "We don't have a parking problem. We have a walking problem." 

Contract buses take the football players from their lockers

at Moncrief Neuhaus to the Denius practice field less than a mile away and bring them back. 

I believe that it is why they have a hard time winning: they lack a competitive edge.

In 1982, Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg moved from Harvard to UT. In 2005, when Weinberg was reputed to be the highest paid professor at $400,000 football coach Mack Brown was paid $2.1 million. [In 2023], coach Steve Sarkisian was paid $10.6 million and quarterback Arch Manning earned $1.6 million from Name Image and Likeness (NIL) under NCAA rules in place since 2021. Weinberg was awarded a $3 million Breakthrough Prize in 2020 just one of several such honors over the years. (NecessaryFacts; January 21, 2025.) 

Ahead of the 2025 playing seaon, Arch Manning’s NIL payments were tallied at $6.8 million. (https://www.foxsports.com/stories/college-football/top-25-college-athletes-highest-nil-valuations) That being as it is, the fact remains that an undergraduate playing football earns three times more than the best paid professors and eight times more than the average professor’s salary. (See: https://texascollegesalaries.com/institution/17)

[I believe that Stanford science and Harvard economics put into proper context their very successful footballers. See “Stanford Alumni in the NFL Playoffs” here and football at Harvard here.  

See also Harvard Players Health Study ]

These performing arts students called in a complaint
on a professor who parked in the wrong space.
The citation is on the windshield.

The Human Resources department sent me a questionnaire about my separation. “On a scale of 1 to 10…” Most of it was for academics and managers. Some was for me and mine. At the end were two short essay questions. 

On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely am I to recommend UT as a place to work. I gave it a 3. 

• About a decade before I came to the University of Texas, I was earning my degrees while working part time for a multinational corporation headquartered in Europe. I knew that no one there knew who I was or cared. What mattered most was my boss, my co-workers, and our clients and their customers. The University of Texas is like that: 55,000 students; 22,000 staff and faculty; deep in the Heart of Texas. All that mattered was the supervisors I could talk to on a first name basis, my team, and the community which we served. 

Is there anything else you would like to share about your experience at the University?

• I loved the museums and I really will miss the libraries. The semester-long checkouts made both research and casual reading very easy, whether writing about the history of physical science and its intersection with the fine arts or catching up on nineteenth century essayists. Occasionally, my daily work let me chat with students and faculty in the performing arts; they are always so interesting. All of that can be hard to find in one place in the private sector. But in the free market, I can make my own opportunities. Here, the paths were fewer and somewhat tangled with undergrowth.

Signage often provided an opportunity
to discuss semantics and sociology. 

I applied for eight other openings on campus, three of them in my own department, and I never got an interview. I adhere to Maslow's Hierarchy. I work for (1) transcendence and (2) self-actualization, (3) my team and (4) our clients, and then I consider (5) the money. This was not the best environment for me and there is more money elsewhere.

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

The Lightbulb Does Not Need to be Changed

AFK: Parking Enforcement 

Minimizing the Likelihood of Bad Cops 

Shifting the Paradigm of Private Security 

Physics for Astronomers: The Works of Steven Weinberg 

Late to the Game: Moneyball (and Ted Williams)

Growing up in Cleveland, of course I was an Indians fan, reading the box scores and Gordon Cobbledick every morning, collecting Topps cards, listening to games on radio and watching on TV. In college, I got away from it all. Working a contract in Cleveland March 96 to May 97, I picked it up again while the Tribe was hot and I actually attended a game but drifted away after Mike Hargrove was fired for winning division and league titles but never the World Series. Here and now, later this month, The Red-Headed  League is taking a multigenerational tour of Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Detroit, and Chicago just to buy peanuts and crackerjack. To keep up with the news while they tour, I have been reading books.

• Strike Four: The Evolution of Baseball by Richard Hershberger
• Moneyball: The Art of Winning and Unfair Game by Michael Lewis (also watched the movie twice)
• The ESPN Baseball Encyclopedia (2000 pages of statistics)
• The Science of Hitting by Ted Williams

With Strike Four as background, Moneyball was fascinating. Although Billie Beane fought, won, and lost his battle in 2002, the concepts of alternative statistics had deep roots. The book and the movie both nod to Bill James, of course, and of necessity, the book reveals more of the otherwise hidden history. 

So, Ted Williams drew from me a wry smile when I read this:

“Now, if a .250 hitter up forty times gets 10 hits, maybe if he had laid off bad pitches he would have gotten five walks. That’s five fewer at-bats or 10 hits for 35, or .286. And he would have scored more—everybody has been crying for more runs—because he would have been on base more.” (Page 26).

It is just a glimpse of the theories that Beane was pursuing in Moneyball but it indicates that some professionals who thought deeply about the game had ideas that most others never considered. 

Bill James’s Baseball Abstracts is often cited in Moneyball as having been cited by others. James was not alone and it should have been surprising if he had been. Our common culture has been influenced by scientific thinking at the same time that baseball was evolving. The first rule book was published in 1845 and older (partial) publications are known. Also, unlike other games with simple tallies of wins and losses with points scored, baseball is a game of statistics. In Moneyball, Lewis followed James in insisting that followers do not copy but develop new theories and test those with not just new data but new kinds of data. 

According to Hershberger, among those other researchers were Ken Mauriello and Jack Armbruster of AVM Systems. Later, Bill James worked with Dick Cramer to establish Stats, Inc., which was eventually sold to Fox News in 1999 for $45 million. (See, also, When Big Data was Small: My Life in Baseball and Drug Design by Richard D. Cramer; University of Nebraska Press, 2019.) Meanwhile Paul DePodesta met AVM and then was hired away from Cleveland by Billie Beane in 1998. However, as early as 1977, Dan Okrent bought his copy of Baseball Abstracts #1, and took the knowledge to his friends who met to talk baseball at La Rotisserie Française and hence, “Rotisserie Baseball” as the start of fantasy leagues. It must be noted, also, that in Moneyball, James is cited as having played “tabletop baseball” as a youngster. That would have been an expected (if not wildly popular) hobby at time when kids built large scale soapbox racers and miniature slot car racers, flew powered model airplanes and model rockets.

That being as it was, it was not until 1981, that Okrent was able get Sports Illustrated to write about Bill James, Okrent’s first submission having been rejected by “proofreaders” two years earlier by for contradicting “known facts.” Even more to the point, also, in Moneyball: Mike Gimbel was a statistician for the Boston Red Sox; Craig Wright did the  job for the Texas Rangers; Eddie Epstein worked for the Baltimore Orioles; and none was successful in their roles. Today, things are different. Whether Beane was the prime mover or an agency of something else is for historiography to explore. 

Arthur Koestler's The Sleepwalkers is about the astronomers (astrologers) between Galileo and Newton who came close to but never touched the relationships between measuring the area under a curve, the slope of a curve at a point, and the motions of bodies falling on Earth and the orbits of planets around the Sun. (See Copernicus on the Revolution of Heavenly Bodies here https://necessaryfacts.blogspot.com/2017/11/copernicus-on-revolution-of-heavenly.html

In a science fiction novel (perhaps Neuromancer or Count Zero), a European clucks that Americans think that everything was newly invented in their own generation. In baseball, we now (2023) have a 20-second pitch clock on the field. In fact, baseball always had a 20-second rule. 

“The 1901 season saw the implementation of a predecessor to the modern-day pitch clock. When no runners were on base, a one-ball penalty would be imposed if the pitcher did not deliver a pitch within 20 seconds of the batter taking his stance at the plate.^[11][12] The rules were tightened before the start of the 1955 season, and the 20-second timer now started once the pitcher received the ball. However, these 20-second limits were hardly ever enforced, and were left to the umpire's judgement.^[13][14]”. — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitch_clock

Major League Baseball does acknowledge the new science of statistics and at the same time grants the importance of the fantasy leagues of fandom. 

• MLB Standard statistics here: https://www.mlb.com/glossary/standard-stats
• MLB Advanced Statistics here: https://www.mlb.com/glossary/advanced-stats

“In the past several decades, the baseball industry has become more enlightened -- thanks to an assist from advanced metrics.

"Although standard statistics remain quite valuable, advanced formulas and figures have played a pivotal role in the creation of championship teams -- both in Major League Baseball and fantasy leagues around the world.

"Today, each big league franchise relies upon advanced stats to some degree, with a growing number of clubs employing complete staffs devoted to their study, development and deployment in decision-making processes.

"Many advanced stats have long been tied to sabermetrics -- a reference to the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) -- a term defined by Bill James as "the search for objective knowledge about baseball." James, widely considered the face and most influential advocate of sabermetric study, has helped shape the lens through which the game of baseball is viewed.” (Ibid)

Does art imitate life or does life imitate art? Along Interstate 35 over downtown Austin is a billboard with a motivational message: William Shatner and “Boldly go.” Everyone knows what that means. So, it would be unusual, perhaps, if over the course of the past 35 years, science had no equal and opposite attraction for baseball.

“As in baseball, the discovery of bacterial diversity has experienced a transition from relying on the subjective judgment of experts to objective and universal statistical methods. Originally, discovery and demarcation of bacterial species required a lot of expertise with a particular group of organisms, involving difficult measures of metabolic and chemical differences. To make the taxonomy more accessible, decades ago the field complemented this arduous approach with a kind of idiot’s guide, where anyone could use widely available molecular techniques to identify species—for example, a certain level of overall DNA sequence similarity.” — “Science Needs More Moneyball” by Frederick M. Cohan, American Scientist, May-June 2012, Vol. 100. No. 3, page 182. https://www.americanscientist.org/article/science-needs-more-moneyball

George Carlin on Baseball vs Football

This was often part of his show and the content changed for different venues and  audiences. The easy narrative was that football is bad and baseball is good.

• Football is a 20th century game of technology. Baseball is a 19th century pastoral game.
• Football is played on a rigidly defined gridiron field. Baseball is played in a park where the foul lines widen out to infinity and every park is different.
• In football you wear a helmet. In baseball, you wear a cap. 
• Baseball is so civilized that the uniforms have pockets. 
• Football proceeds by downs. In baseball you are “up.” 
• Football has penalties. In baseball, it is just an error, (oops).
• Football is a game of land conquest. In that, we are Europe Junior. We advanced on the Native Americans ten yards at a time: Ohio down; Midwest to go. 
• The object in football is to drive through your enemy’s defenses with an aerial assault, a ground assault, a blitz or a shotgun. In baseball, the object is to go home, to be safe at home.
• In every other game, the offense controls the ball. In baseball the defense controls the ball.

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Hail to the Spartan Victors? 

Why a Level Playing Field? 

Shrugging the Stigma of Success