71–80 of 121 posts
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Yes. This isn't reddit. Please provide some rationale for your namecalling, but preferably please just stay at home.
/me watches the comment thread change over time as those who are more motivated by tribal allegiances start to outweigh those who appreciate a fair joke
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Actually, there are plenty of competent administrators who would probably work for ~ $150K plus benefits (no free house). Having administration who are paid like landed gentry while professors and grad students are paid peanuts and students have to engage huge amounts of debt relative to their expected future earnings IS THE PROBLEM.
This is very true. We don't see too many administrators who are paid outrageously, our athletics department handles all of that. Highest paid state employee for a few years - the ex Coach Mangino.
I think the coach of a football program making a huge sum is different from the administrator of a college - for one thing, elite football coaching talent is in short supply. The supply of executives who can lead a university is not. Last I checked there are plenty of executives cooling their heels golfing etc.
However I could be convinced to hold football/basketball coaching salaries way down as part of a movement to de-professionalize college athletics by sending the coaches who are really using college athletics as a way to huge salaries to the pros. The way it operates now is simply absurd, especially given that elite level players receive none of the spoils of filling stadiums during the prime athletic years of their lives.
Back directly on topic, the problem with administrators making huge multiples of professors is it is attracting the wrong kind of people, i.e. profit maximizers who figure out how to funnel increasingly large sums of money into their own pockets. As an example consider the activities of the UC Regents: http://www.metroactive.com/features/diploma-mills.html
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This is very true. Most young male engineering grads like to gloat the fact that they make a lot more than their humanities counterparts (perhaps to make up for the misery and lack of female companionship during their undergrad?) But the reality is that if you graduated with a humanities/social science degree from a ivy league or sub-ivy school, you are bound to do pretty well. As opposed to their state school counte…
Ahhh this is one of the issues I've heard tossed around - what makes for a successful individual post graduation? How can we measure it? The feds are putting in place systems to track income as the best metric. But... I hesitate to call a 100k$ rockstar EE major ten times more successful than a rockstar chem e doing water purification work in Guatemala for 10k$ as a humanitarian.
All of this outrage just stems from a confusion over the point of private research universities. The Purpose of Harvard is Not to Educate People: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2008/05/29/... State universities, yes, those are supposed to educate people. But not Ivy League schools. Their purpose is to produce new knowledge. The authors of the OP article then conflate two discussions: (1) Should priv…
Um, really ignorant question here, but what book on reasoning can I read to be able to see through arguments and debates like you just did? I want to learn about empirical and normative questions, etc.
I'll give the same advice I give as a teaching grad student to undergrads who think us grad students are incredibly smart: it only takes a tiny amount of knowledge or training for someone to have that you don't for them to seem so much smarter. Don't be fooled. As a grad student enslaved by a university, I have become quite familiar with all the arguments about the purpose and place of research vs. teaching.
Anyways, this confusion between normative and empirical claims is extremely common; once you become aware of the difference, you see it everywhere. The easiest way to familiarize yourself with this and related ideas is to take a introductory course on moral philosophy or read an introductory textbook. Unfortunately, even if I thought the book I used in college was all that great (it was OK), I forgot the name of it. The material is fairly universal at the introductory level, though, so any decent book would do.
Oh God yes, I can't agree with this more. My wife worked as an adjunct at Indiana University, killing herself with a 15-hour load for eight thousand bucks while the president of the university, who arguably contributes nothing whatsoever, earned a cool $425,000 and had a free luxury house on campus. This year, she's got a real job (for a year as a visiting professor) for $35K and benefits; it's going to feel like we'…
the president of the university, who arguably contributes nothing whatsoever, earned a cool $425,000 and had a free luxury house on campus. University presidents may well be overpaid, but it is simply uninformed to claim that they "contribute nothing whatsoever." Besides setting the direction of the entire institution, an effective president will raise far more income for the school via fundraising than the cost of t…
To what end?
The answer does not seem to be "providing a quality education to the university's students." So, regardless of the dollar amounts raised, "contribute nothing whatsoever" may very well be an accurate assessment of value. It depends on what that money is going towards, and what you consider a worthwhile contribution.
All of this outrage just stems from a confusion over the point of private research universities. The Purpose of Harvard is Not to Educate People: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2008/05/29/... State universities, yes, those are supposed to educate people. But not Ivy League schools. Their purpose is to produce new knowledge. The authors of the OP article then conflate two discussions: (1) Should priv…
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Some years ago, I saw a 60 minutes episode on issues in higher education. The reporter picked a biology journal off a shelf, read its arcane title, and exclaimed "who actually reads this stuff?" to back up her claim about how useless journals are... as if she were somehow qualified to judge the importance of a paper by its title. I couldn't help but imagining what she would have said if she picked up a paper titled "…
Fortunately it's not up to her to decide. That said, it seems that some papers go out of their way to hide what the paper is really about by looking at the title.
There are plenty of examples of things that might be meaningless to a graph-theory professor that are a core part of the language of a combinatorics specialist.
And of course, undergrads and humanities majors best keep their mouths shut.
"A glance at scholarly journals or university-press catalogs might make one wonder how much of this "research" is advancing knowledge and how much is part of a guild's need to credentialize its members." A glance? Really? Judging the life's work of a few thousand people who got into academia to do research is easily judged in a 'glance'? It's interesting that some would like universities to be little more than vocati…
Some years ago, I saw a 60 minutes episode on issues in higher education. The reporter picked a biology journal off a shelf, read its arcane title, and exclaimed "who actually reads this stuff?" to back up her claim about how useless journals are... as if she were somehow qualified to judge the importance of a paper by its title. I couldn't help but imagining what she would have said if she picked up a paper titled "…
My father is a senior, tenured professor of mechanical engineering. He's won a bunch of prizes and fellowships. He's probably one of the best in his field. I don't ever recall anything about substantial raises. In fact, all I ever hear out of him is that they're cutting staff, restricting bonuses and cutting raises. This coming from a man who works on research and the related papers/books almost every waking hour of…
All of this outrage just stems from a confusion over the point of private research universities. The Purpose of Harvard is Not to Educate People: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2008/05/29/... State universities, yes, those are supposed to educate people. But not Ivy League schools. Their purpose is to produce new knowledge. The authors of the OP article then conflate two discussions: (1) Should priv…
Then why do they have undergraduates? Surely, they could produce more knowledge if they eliminated that distraction from their mission entirely.
> If it weren’t for the fact that it’s hard to get alumni donations when you don’t have any alumni, serious consideration would doubtless be given to cutting out students entirely. Sure, some would complain that they enjoy teaching, that it keeps them fresh, or that students can be useful as research assistants. But those are reasons why the students are useful to the faculty; they are not assertions that the purpose of the institution is to educate students for their own sakes.
>Don’t believe me? Here is the test: when was the last time Harvard made a senior tenure offer to someone because they were a world-class educator, rather than a world-class researcher? Not only is the answer “never,” the question itself is somewhat laughable.
Honestly, once you realize that private research universities use undergraduates as a source of money, all sorts of seemingly strange behaviors by the university become simple. Why does Princeton allow so many academically unqualified students in to play sports? Alumni donations. Why does it charge $40k+ per year (albeit with financial aid) if it really wanted to attract the absolute best students (since it doesn't actually need the money)? Because the students aren't important and, heck, might as well pay for a couple more buildings.