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The Misuses of the University

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Re: The Misuses of the University

#31

Post by nyeah »

WalterBright wrote: post #29

Johns Hopkins has a business school, the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School, which was peculiarly not mentioned in the essay. You'd think their own business school would be capable of bringing fiscal sanity to the university?

Business school professors are professors. They've never run any business. They can train MBA students to get hired and promoted. They can keep their own personal money in S&P500 index funds. That's about it.

(EDIT: Even if a few B-school professors have real-world business management skills, why would the university listen to them? They're just employees, and they're not nearly expensive enough to be credible.)

Re: The Misuses of the University

#32

Post by nephihaha »

"Limp signs on the fencing announce the opening of the SNF Agora Institute, by which, he’s informed, the university is “building stronger global democracy."

"In 2017, the institute was endowed with a $150 million gift from a Greek shipping fortune..."

Here is Johns Hopkins' problem in a nutshell. Taking money from billionaire "philanthropists" and global organisations to put an intellectual veneer onto their vested interests. Johns Hopkins has done this in a number of areas.

What kind of "stronger global democracy" would this be? There is no global democracy and no global government, yet. How interested are shipping magnates in democracy as opposed to plutocracy?

Re: The Misuses of the University

#33

Post by nephihaha »

djoldman wrote: post #27

Johns Hopkins University is not a university. Many other "Universities" are not universities either. "Johns Hopkins Labs" would be a more accurate name as less than 10% of revenue is tuition related. I'm not sure why folks including professors continue to view these places as primarily about teaching students or academics. These $100-$250 million building projects are pretty inconsequential when research grants and c…

Johns Hopkins gets a lot of money from vested interests to push whatever suits them.

Re: The Misuses of the University

#34

Post by nephihaha »

PaulHoule wrote: post #11
Insanity wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'advanced culture' is in the eye of the beholder. At the time, Rome was an advanced culture and we have a bunch of details of their fall. Not to take away from your point - I agree and the current fall makes it more tangible.

The fall of Rome also took centuries, historians can't even agree on exactly when it began.

In the case of Rome, it depends how you define "fall". There were certainly some military setbacks and also some bad climatic conditions (which affected central America and China around the same time.) Probably better to say that Rome was in decline for a long time.

Re: The Misuses of the University

#35

Post by PaulHoule »

impendia wrote: post #25
DesaiAshu wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having personally run a college P&L, this dodges the bigger sunk costs of higher education: 1. Old and expensive to maintain land 2. High cost of living for all staff (weighted heaviest towards faculty) 3. Ancillaries that are revenue negative, _very_ expensive, and inconsequential to the purpose of the education (eg. the lacrosse team and the Polo Club) It's nice to point fingers at the people who are taking very he…

I got curious, and looked up the Harvard Polo Club. Apparently it naturally faded away as polo declined in popularity, but then was revived in 2006. I understand that, if you have a current and active polo club running, then you either have to keep it going or run the risk of pissing people off. But, if I can ask you to speculate, why might Harvard have revived its club in 2006?

Probably they got a donation.

I used to have a view of a baseball field out my office window until they rolled up the astroturf to start construction of the new computing and information science building.

They got some money to build a really nice fan-friendly facility off-campus. Still the thing about baseball is that the season is early in the year and starts before the weather is comfortable for home games so they spend the first half of the season going to away games down south, far enough away that they're probably buying airline tickets instead of riding the bus the way that Ivy League (or ECAC) teams usually ride the bus to go to other Ivy League (or ECAC) schools.

If it wasn't for Lacrosse we wouldn't have anybody using our football stadium in the spring and hey, Lacrosse is both a men's and women's sport. (At Cornell we're lucky enough to have two football teams to keep it busy in the Fall)

Critics would say that Lacrosse is a boon to rich students since poor students don't go to high schools that have Lacrosse and it largely escapes the notice of the marginalization-industrial complex because those folks are aware that there is an industry in SAT test prep and not so aware that there is Lacrosse.

Re: The Misuses of the University

#36

Post by Nicook »

mandevil wrote: post #21
markus_zhang wrote: post #16

It is just part of the establishment. When the establishment withered it withered with it. It’s just a symptom of a larger, deeper problem.

Not just that the establishment, but the entire educational complex, from the large research universities like JHU to the community colleges, were built around a 1950s-1970's American economy and the society that supported that. And now that that is gone, what happens to all of the universities? They've been just as corrupted and degraded as the rest of it. My wife and I were talking last night about how Disneyland l…

The third worldization of the USA continues at pace. Expensive reasonable enclaves for the rich, nothing for the rest.

Re: The Misuses of the University

#37

Post by scuff3d »

mandevil wrote: post #21
markus_zhang wrote: post #16

It is just part of the establishment. When the establishment withered it withered with it. It’s just a symptom of a larger, deeper problem.

Not just that the establishment, but the entire educational complex, from the large research universities like JHU to the community colleges, were built around a 1950s-1970's American economy and the society that supported that. And now that that is gone, what happens to all of the universities? They've been just as corrupted and degraded as the rest of it. My wife and I were talking last night about how Disneyland l…

The community college I went to was doing this same crap. I remember going to the opening of a new arts building that provided less usable space then the building it replaced, and sitting around with all the donors and school administration paying themselves on the back. Meanwhile they didn't have enough room for most of the departments, and the tutoring programs were getting slashed.

Re: The Misuses of the University

#38

Post by statskier »

djoldman wrote: post #27

Johns Hopkins University is not a university. Many other "Universities" are not universities either. "Johns Hopkins Labs" would be a more accurate name as less than 10% of revenue is tuition related. I'm not sure why folks including professors continue to view these places as primarily about teaching students or academics. These $100-$250 million building projects are pretty inconsequential when research grants and c…

I think that's the whole point. Many university's very nature has shifted significantly and lots of people don't like it and lament the change.

Re: The Misuses of the University

#39

Post by WalterBright »

nyeah wrote: post #31
WalterBright wrote: post #29

Johns Hopkins has a business school, the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School, which was peculiarly not mentioned in the essay. You'd think their own business school would be capable of bringing fiscal sanity to the university?

Business school professors are professors. They've never run any business. They can train MBA students to get hired and promoted. They can keep their own personal money in S&P500 index funds. That's about it. (EDIT: Even if a few B-school professors have real-world business management skills, why would the university listen to them? They're just employees, and they're not nearly expensive enough to be credible.)

I'm reminded of "Back to School" where Rodney Dangerfield explained to the business professor how business really works.

Re: The Misuses of the University

#40

Post by neilv »

noelwelsh wrote: post #14

When I was at university, my institution was investing $millions in building various new building. A grumbled to my supervisor, who explained to me that this was important to attracting new students. It's an unfortunate truth that decisions to attend a given university are often made based on an image in the student's (or their parents) head about what a university should look like, rather than things like academics.

I liked MIT's "building 20" cluster of wooden shacks, which were featured prominently in the east side of campus. It was said that, when an experiment needed more space, people would casually punch a hole in a wall.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Building_20

Building 20 was razed to build the Gehry-designed, donor-named Stata Center (incorporating a donor-named Gates "tower"). Breaking with MIT tradition of calling buildings by number, IME most people call it by donor name. (Gehry's reflective surfaces could blind biologists in building 68 across the courtyard, at least before the donor-named Koch building was installed nearby.) Stata has its merits, but I think grad students who punched a hole in the wall would be in trouble.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stata_Center

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