121–130 of 296 posts
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> Buckminster Fuller's models? What now!?
Part of the Stanford library collection. Every time they are loaned out to an art show they go through conservation.
Stanford is building a new "campus" in Redwood City. 35 acres. 2,700 people on site. None are students. None are faculty. No teaching or research will occur there. It's all administrators .[1] "School of Medicine administration; Stanford Libraries and University Archives; the major administrative units of Business Affairs; Land, Buildings and Real Estate; University Human Resources; Residential & Dining Enterprises;…
This video overview of the project is dangerously close to parody: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKY0QdSElgc
Featuring the:
* Managing Director, Development * Vice President of Public Affairs * Vice President Business Affairs and Chief Financial Officer * University Architect and Executive Director, Campus Planning & Design * Director, Architecture * Assistant Vice President for Business Affairs Finance and Facilities * Associate Vice President of Sponsored Research
Extremely unpopular opinion: Let's cut both the extra admin, and excess tenured professors. In fact, the entire tenure system should be completely upended. At my alma mater there were a lot of professors who didn't have enough students sign up for their classes, or their field of study was phased out, or reduced. Instead they sat around doing "research" and when they were forced to teach, quite a few openly expressed…
The purpose of universities is twofold: to educate and to produce new knowledge. You seem to have the mindset that most of a professor's work should be teaching-related. People don't do PhDs because they want to teach, they do it because they love their field. And a professor's status (and funding!) depends on a history of producing high quality (and quantity) research, not their teaching prowess.
Actually that's not quite true. Most continuing academics in Australia are "40/40/20" teaching/research/service. So at least on-paper, the teaching is on an equal footing with the research. In practice, universities tend to specialise. Research groups in the university's focus areas will in addition have a large number of post-docs, research fellows, and other non-teaching staff, balancing that research area far more towards research. And the academics leading those grants will point to the grant money they are bringing in and get a lot of "teaching relief" so they can focus on it. And yes, they'll tend to get promoted faster. However, this also means that some of the other academics in that area (and in all the other fields that go to supporting it) end up having to focus more strongly on the teaching, to make this work. While you can locally optimise yourself if you're keener on research than teaching, most schools receive more of their money from teaching than from research, and it is also the teaching that produces the future PhD and post-docs to fuel the research, so overall they still have to retain a delicate balance between research and teaching.
Yes. This is why I refuse to donate to my alma mater anymore. Tuition has nearly tripled in in fourteen years while they are still teaching the same number of students with roughly the same or fewer full time faculty. There's something seriously wrong with that and this is a huge symptom of it. Until they get their shit together, they need less money coming in, not more. This is supposed to be a nonprofit institution…
I do agree that admin costs are too high. However I think most of the tuition growth is due to decreases in state and federal funding.
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When student loans were able to be discharged in bankruptcy, it was popular to declare bankruptcy on graduation. By the time they saved up enough for a down payment on a house, the bankruptcy will have fallen off the records, so effectively they got a free education (not the ideal mechanism for doing so, better to give people free education upfront). Maybe there is a middle ground where student debt is not easily dis…
> (or at least give people $10k/yr towards tuition) This just means the colleges will raise their price by $10k/year. They will charge what the market will bear and capture the subsidy for themselves.
Obligatory: > Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: > First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet U…
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This is the view of people who have not really looked at university budgets. "experiences" are cheap compared to headcount. Buildings and experiences are mainly funded by outside donation specifically for the experience or building. People do not often donate to "expand salaries and headcount for faculty and administrators". The result is that students pay for headcount and donors pay for experiences. It isn't just a…
On the research point, why are research and teaching commingled? Both are important, but it seems that they require very different skillsets. Would we be better off filling universities primarily with people who love teaching, and are great at it, and having some other kind of institution (or some separate division of universities) do the research? Is this heresy?
They aren't. To an ever increasing extent, undergraduate teaching is done by adjunct staff, who are not involved in research, and who work on a temporary basis.
Professors with good research funding can often buy themselves out of all or part of their teaching load. Many choose to teach only the upper level or graduate courses, where immersion in research is in fact a useful qualification for teaching.
Disclosure: I was an adjunct for one semester, many years ago.
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Yeah, who needs the Library and Archives? The book conservation lab is one of the things in the RWC location, that's clearly overhead that's totally not needed! Buckminster Fuller's models? Let 'em molder.
Today, a library fits on a hard drive.
As an adjunct professor running one class per year, I ran the calculation of: (Amount I'm paid per class / (students in class * cost per credit * credits for class) ) And found I'm paid about 10% of what the students pay for the experience of taking my class. I can't help wonder what happens to the rest of that money.
Now that's a business model screaming for disruption.