As much as I like to complain, I’m mostly happy with my experiences, now as a professor, once as a student, at American universities. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of things I would change, but I feel like some of what we do in the classroom achieves a higher purpose than simple brainwashing and that the research we do has some intellectual validity (at least in my area, I can’t speak for other areas).
I have no illusions that this will last. I suspect that eventually American universities may eventually be turned into Galt-funded propaganda mills the way that think tanks and establishment media already have been. I’ve always thought this would start with the business schools and then creep into the less intellectually upstanding areas like economics, but that it might eventually reach all of us. There probably won’t be too many complaints — except from the real quacks (e.g. people who read this blog) — because people do like money, no matter where it comes from.
Steve M smartly dissects the NYT profile of Glenn Hubbard, the right-wing crank who is Mitt Romney’s chief economic adviser and dean of the Columbia Business School:
[T]he way some decisions have been made at the school was described as “Brezhnevian” by one professor, who like many interviewed for this article requested anonymity in order to preserve relationships with the school. In one vote, faculty members were asked to raise a hand if they were in favor of a particular change. There were no dissenters, several attendees recalled.The most memorable vote came in the fall of 2008, when Mr. Mayer gathered senior faculty members and made a surprising announcement: Dean Hubbard’s job was in peril. President Bollinger was balking at appointing him to a second five-year term.
According to several participants, Mr. Mayer urged professors to demonstrate their support for Mr. Hubbard with a petition, which attendees were asked to sign on the spot. Several current and former faculty members used the identical word to describe the experience: bizarre.
[…]In absence of any official word, faculty members have been left to speculate about why Mr. Hubbard nearly lost his job. Nor does anyone know why Mr. Bollinger decided to reappoint him, though current and former faculty members have a pet theory: that Mr. Bollinger was worried about losing the financial support of Mr. Hubbard’s friends, most notably Mr. Kravis.
(Henry R. Kravis is a private equity magnate who recently pledged $100 million to the Columbia Business School.)
PeakVT
Also from today’s NYT: The Self-Destruction of the 1 Percent (via).
reflectionephemeral
I keep expecting gravity to reassert itself. I’ve figured that as wealth and safe a country as we are, we can’t have our discourse on all issues be entirely detached from reality. And I expect demographic change to produce a more reality-friendly Republican Party in a decade or two. That matters, in this polarized country.
But maybe that’s just wishful thinking on my part. There’s no iron law that we can’t just continue to get worse. Here we are after Iraq, after the financial crisis, and we aren’t any more serious as a country.
Lurking Canadian
I don’t love the steady encroachment of corporate money into academia. I do, however, like continuing to be able to pay my RAs and receive a steady paycheque. I don’t think the money should all come from students, and austerity-obsessed governments aren’t likely to stop cutting back, so I don’t really see the alternative.
Gin & Tonic
@Lurking Canadian: “Steady encroachment”? Ever heard of Rockefeller University?
raven
Does your institution offer any kind of faculty development opportunities? Do you take advantage of them?
Metrosexual Manichean Monster DougJ
@raven:
What do you mean by faculty development opportunities?
Davis X. Machina
Not a problem for the rest of us who aren’t in business, or economics. Or more accurately, a self-solving problem. In another twenty years, you won’t be able to take a BA, except from a few country clubs at the top, and a bunch of online mills at the bottom. Pearson/Raytheon presents The Teaching Company, and fair Harvard. That’ll be the ecosystem.
“Every tub stands on its own bottom”. “Foster dynamic public-private partnerships.” “Incubate the next generation of entrepreneurs.”
In medieval universities, you read theology, because even if it wasn’t true, it was the meal-ticket. B-school is the only school you need. Steven R. Covey, meet Peter Lombard. The Four Books of Sentences of Highly Effective People.
raven
@Metrosexual Manichean Monster DougJ: We do monthly workshops for faculty. Some are day-long f2f and some are lunch and learn sessions. We survey faculty to see what topics they are interested in and try to focus on things that will help their teaching.
JWR
OT: TeeVee tells me that Snarlin’ Alen Spector has passed.
Metrosexual Manichean Monster DougJ
@raven:
I’ve been to some things like that. I didn’t find them very useful.
I go regularly to things that are about advising students, and I do find that quite useful.
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
@Lurking Canadian: You’re not going to want to hear this, but from my perspective academia is awash in money. Both public and private. Brand new dining halls, student unions, elaborate fitness centers, new dorms and classroom buildings. Meanwhile the rest of our infrastructure molders.
I suspect all the money going for these things is earmarked and can’t be used for mundane shit like RAs, salaries, and operations. Except maybe the featherbedded assistant to the associate dean of student affairs positions. There seem to be plenty of those, too.
raven
@Metrosexual Manichean Monster DougJ: My experience is that many faculty feel the same way you do. We keep trying.
eta. Actually that is not true in the sense that our evaluations indicate they do find them useful. Now, if we could MEASURE how the students benefit we’d have something.
pseudonymous in nc
The recent spat at UVa seemed like a sign of B-school mentality infecting wider academia.
@Gin & Tonic:
Yeah, but it’s not a B-school. It does bio/medical postgrad stuff. The endowments of Gilded Age industrialists (Duke, Cornell, Stanford, Johns Hopkins, etc.) have generally not resulted in ideological institutions.
I’m more troubled by things like the Mercatus/GMU relationship — where you have a Koch propaganda outlet glommed onto a department of a state university. Or the Hoover Institution, which is Stanford’s wingnut welfare wing. Or by the BB&T bank boss funding Ayn Rand indoctrination courses.
Boudica
@JWR:And that makes 3. Alex Karras, Gary Collins and now Arlen Specter.
Cain
OT:
RIP Arlen Specter has died.
He was a good man, although I didn’t agree wtih a lot he did, but he was that brand of Republican you can work with.
BGinCHI
@Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason: Gross generalization. If you mean some state flagship campuses (although almost none are flush right now) and the big privates (huge endowments) then yes. Probably less than 5% of all universities are anywhere close to how you describe them.
It’s true administrations are putting money in stupid places, but this doesn’t mean there is a lot of it.
You need to separate haves from have-nots in what you are saying.
Spaghetti Lee
I wonder if they were saying the same things about the dire future of academia in twenty years in 1992, or 1972 for that manner. Not that things are all hunky-dory, but the transition into outright propaganda training centers has yet to happen, and I honestly don’t think it will. I mean, rich businessmen having lots of influence on a business school? Seems kinda dog-bites-man to me.
Scout211
My hubby, Dr. Scout211, is in his last academic year of teaching at a private mid-sized university. He taught well beyond retirement age but is now finally ready to retire.
He is seeing huge changes coming for his university. The pressure is growing to change hiring (more short-term contracts with no tenure) more and more online courses (with no student contact) and more focus on producing a “work ready” graduate and less focus on a liberal arts degree.
The administration points to a coming sharp reduction in Pell grants and other financial aid for students as the main reason for the changes.
But it really seems to be the online for-profit “universities” that are driving this sad development.
SiubhanDuinne
@Boudica: Was just coming here to post about Specter. Had not heard about Gary Collins.
Gin & Tonic
@pseudonymous in nc: Not always just Gilded Age. I guess we have to see how the Koch-funded cancer center at MIT goes. I do recall a major hue and cry there 30 years ago when David Baltimore joined/helped set up/whatever the Whitehead research center. Haven’t followed much of it since, and I’m not in bio, so I could be talking through my hat, but it seems pretty reasonable.
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
@BGinCHI: My experience is with the Claremont Colleges, Hopkins, and the Pennsylvania former teacher’s colleges. Not flagships, not huge endowments either, AFAIK. Except maybe Hopkins.
I don’t understand the building boom. Maybe it’s like sharks, though, if a campus doesn’t keep moving, it dies.
Lurking Canadian
@Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason: Oh yes, there is often money for capital, but rarely any for ongoin operations. We hear stories of researchers winning multi-million infrastructure grants to equip labs with top of line equipment, which equipment is never turned on because they have no money to run it.
max
turned into Galt-funded propaganda mills the way that think tanks and establishment media already have been. I’ve always thought this would start with the business schools and then creep into the less intellectually upstanding areas like economics, but that it might eventually reach all of us.
Uh, I’m pretty the Galtites are in the econ department and were busy taking over the B-schools (with the exception of some coastal U’s). I’ve been listening to this crap for 35-odd years (since I could read, basically), and it’s the same shit all the time.
People keep talking like Willard is respectable because Reagan and I’m all like, ‘Have you never encountered those people before? They’re always like this.’
max
[‘You could look up your low-rent (and frequently high-rent) econ doctrine from 1880 or 1928 or 1982 and it all reads the same, except the older stuff is written in better style.’]
techno
Just a heads-up. Hubbard is the uber-jerk in “Inside Job.” Caught in high-def!
As for Rockefeller U. Is someone talking about an institution other than the University of Chicago?
barath
@techno:
Exactly what I was thinking. Here’s a clip from Inside Job with Hubbard caught with his hand in the Goldman Sachs trough:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaXNqGgIc-g
nastybrutishntall
@PeakVT:
ugh.
Roy G.
Once again, look to California: The bust-out of the UC system led by the likes of Mr. Dianne Feinstein aka Dick Blum, and enabled by neoliberal empire builders like Mark Yudoff has turned the UC system into a privatized piggy bank, and model of the world, where the Board of Regents is the World Bank, and the campuses play Greece and Spain.
Austerity for thee but not for me! is the regents’ hue and cry.
Elizabelle
@pseudonymous in nc:
Yes, UVA.
And that Board of Visitors Rector who led the attempted coup against the university president is still there.
She was reappointed to the Board by Governor Bob Transvaginal McDonnell.
Elizabelle
@nastybrutishntall:
Didn’t we just have a thread about this a few back? Globobankers gone wild?
Those rich.
jwb
@Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason: Donors like to pay for buildings, professorships and centers. They don’t like to pay for maintenance or administration. Donor support for student support seems to fall somewhere in between, but with raising tuition due largely to falling state subsidies (and a little bit to increased administrative costs) student support is sorely needed.
A moocher
@Lurking Canadian: Absolutely. The infrastructure grants won’t pay for operating costs or staff salaries (with exceptions so restrictive as to exclude almost all successful applicants). Meanwhile, granting agency funds are increasingly restructed to graduate students, directing ever more forcefully to abandoning what an excellent tradition of the M.Sc. in many fields in favour of the 3 year PhD. There’s no money or technical support staff, and university-funded deparmental support positions wither away one at a time.
These are the main reasons I for one am abandoning a modestly successful academic career and returning to consulting. I’m tired of wasting my life shoveling back the tide, and not even getting paid that well.
Gretchen
I spent yesterday evening with graduates of Columbia and U of Chicago School of Library Science. Both schools have since closed. I am a medical technologist, and knew that many med tech schools closed when hospitals went for-profit, since the schools weren’t money makers. I asked why tow of the best library schools in the country had closed, and was told that they weren’t money makers like the business school. My daughter want to get a library degree, and is considering Canada so she can afford the degree and not take out loans that will dwarf her expected salary.
PeakVT
@nastybrutishntall: That irked me, too. But the rest of the column is good, I think. The topic of rising inequality has been written about hundreds of times before, but the presentation, with a reference to a specific historical episode, is novel.
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
@nastybrutishntall:
Oh, isn’t that special, especially considering the earlier thread on DSK and the parties that “prevail among the rich.”
Ugh indeed.
raven
@Gretchen: God, I have a young friend who went to Pratt for her masters in lib science and she is railing about what a ripoff it was.
PJ
Hubbard’s appearance in the documentary Inside Job was hilarious, almost a parody of the snarling, bootlicking courtier defending the rights of the aristocracy to loot the commonwealth.
Roger Moore
@Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason:
I don’t think it dies, but it may lose its attractiveness to top students and slip down the ladder. It’s part of the general problem with the way we measure the success of colleges and universities. They’re judged by the quality of their graduates, but in practice that has at least as much to do with the quality of the students they’re admitting as it does to how well the faculty is teaching the students. The result is that schools that are trying to burnish their academic reputations wind up trying to take the shortcut of attracting better students with fancier amenities, rather than trying to do a better job of teaching the kind of students they were already attracting. You wind up with schools spending tons of money turning their campuses into Club Med to attract top students rather than building up their faculties.
Davis X. Machina
@Roger Moore: Corporate thinking, too, if you look at it just right.
Head-hunting the people your competition have already trained, and not training them yourselves. Make the other guy pay for it, and then make him pay once more by forcing him to bribe the head-huntees to not jump.
No way to break into the vicious circle, though, is there?
rikyrah
still wondering about Willard’s fundraising numbers…
hee hee hee
don’t they have to drop them tomorrow…
hee hee hee
I’m with whomever said that Willard loaned his campaign money
pseudonymous in nc
@Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason:
You see something similar, I think, in hospital administration, where cranes and buildings are a synecdoche of “achievement”. OTOH, I sometimes joke about my college’s transformation into a conference venue with ancillary teaching facilities; shiny is good at attracting side-income and impresses the people they want as donors.
redshirt
It’s a scam! I left college way back in the early 90’s with 90K in debt. My future was thus determined – I’d be working for a Bank one way or another.
The modern academic scheme seems like a highly valued Indentured Servant program.
Chris
THE test case and example of these issues and where they might lead is seen in the UVA case where trader billionaire Paul Tudor Jones, a PR minded entrepreneurial board member called Dragas, and widely respected president Sullivan collided. There’s tons of dirt, it was a real soap opera, and should be studied closely.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/16/magazine/teresa-sullivan-uva-ouster.html?pagewanted=all
http://www.tnr.com/blog/plank/104204/university-of-virginia-teresa-sullivan
Gin & Tonic
@redshirt: I honestly don’t mean to be rude or insensitive, but didn’t you know before you started how much you’d owe at the end? And did it anyway? What did you imagine your options to be?
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
@Roger Moore:
This seems to be what I’m seeing and hearing anecdotally.
Another Halocene Human
@pseudonymous in nc: We can trace all of this back to two things: dropping the top marginal tax rates so much, so top administrators–and wealthy donors–can both get paid obscene amounts while not blinking at paying actual instructors below the poverty line and starve the polity of tax income for state schools or surplus income to support private schools allowing a few very lucky duckies to provide the money… and the strings.
Okay, 1.1–letting very, very wealthy families shield their fortunes from estate taxes through Alaska trusts and other bullshit in the federal tax code
2. deciding long ago to fund college through subsidized loans, instead of grants, and creating an entire infrastructure for extracting wealth out of middle class families. Hence the fancy facilities, well-heeled administration, billion dollars spent on recruiting annually, etc, etc. Europe took a different approach. Uses grades/exams to maintain enrollment eligibility (well, basically exams b/c your grade is all in the final exam) and tuition is … free. Germany’s equivalent to FAFSA, for example, is BaFÖQ, which is a program to defray costs of room and board for lower income students.
Spiraling inequality papered over with cheap credit. Of course money flows to all the wrong things.
And 3. Draining of federal research dollars, letting the Kochs and other scumbags (pharm cos) fill in the breach.
Nobody believes me but what we need is massive inflation in the old “basket of goods”. SSI/SSD reimbursement would be forced upwards, but wealthy seniors would have to change their investment mix or lose it. But that’s fine because that money would flow to younger workers, who would either fucking get paid or run screaming into the streets.
Rent, food, and healthcare have outpaced “inflation” for decades while the rich got richer and the poor poorer and the workers fell from middle class to the brink of poverty.
Real inflation is also the only escape out of the debts of the remaining middle class.
What we need is for inflation so crazy–and focused on durable goods–so that the hedonic adjustment, hide the sausage factory gets a nice big sabot thrown in it.
And any working person who tells you inflation is the “thief” and the “enemy” is a lunatic moron whose opinion you should disregard on every subject forthwith.
wapsie
@Davis X. Machina:
um, what?
Theology in later medieval universities was one of the three “graduate” subjects to be read only after completion of the undergraduate curriculum in “(liberal) arts”.(*) Nearly all major theologians of later Middle Ages were in religious orders — usually one of the big three “mendicant” orders (Franciscans, Dominicans, Augustinian Hermits). This was *not* the path to riches, unless perhaps you were looking to become a bishop (go into administration, as it were) — that certainly did come with wealth and power. But otherwise, if you were in a religious order, you did not strictly speaking even have an income, and if you were going to enter the “secular” clergy (e.g., you got a line of income as a parish priest, whether or not you actually performed the services or hired a vicar to do it for you) — you were looking at a fairly modest income.
If *money* was your goal, you went into what were known as *lucrative sciences*. Those were law (canon and Roman) and medicine.
Not theology. Theology was mostly for nerds and ideologues — people like the Augustinian Hermit Martin Luther, or Ockham, who devoted most of his career to an angry war of words with the papacy over the rule of poverty in the Franciscan order to which he belonged.
(*) The Italian universities, btw, didn’t even get theology faculties until the late fourteenth century. They were frankly secular institutions serving upwardly-mobile bourgeois sons.
redshirt
@Gin & Tonic: Yes. What options do you have when you’re expected to not only go to college, but a great college? I did want to hitchhike around Australia instead, but I was persuaded otherwise. Also, that kind of debt to 18 year old me seemed so abstract as to not be real.
Redleg
I am a faculty member in a B-School at a mid-size regional state university in the southern Midwest. At my university, the B-school mentality you speak of is actually coming from the university president and provost and neither of them have degrees in business or economics. Most of the B-school faculty have resisted and chafed at the administration’s attempts to “rationalize” everything we do. We care about teaching, research, and our community and believe we can do well in each area through traditional faculty governance rather than by running our college like a “business.”
Having said that, we shouldn’t automatically reject ideas because they come from the private sector or from B-schools. I sometimes get the impression from progressive blogs that business studies are not legitimate academic disciplines and that it’s only about making money. I have a number of colleagues who are progressive and thoughtful academics working hard to educate business students to think more ethically and with more concern for the social responsibility of businesses. Please don’t let the highly visible dickheads at elite B-schools that you read about in the news shape your perceptions of B-schools.
Foregone Conclusion
@Another Halocene Human:
Yes, as in the 1970s, high inflation would inevitably bring on another halcyon age of liberalism.
Gin & Tonic
@redshirt: I meant post-graduation options. I’m sorry, but I have pretty little sympathy for people who went to a more expensive school than they could afford and then whine about it afterward. I’m not talking about the waitresses sucked into taking huge loans to go to Phoenix or something, I’m talking about normal middle-income kids who go straight from high school to college and could do other things instead. You want to go $100k in the hole, well that’s going to limit what you can do to repay it. I’m sure you could have gone to your state U at resident prices and incurred far less debt.
Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God
@Another Halocene Human:
We used to even have a name for Real Inflation: Growth.
Once the common wisdom became “Debt Growth Good/Wage Growth Bad”, our current predicament probably became inevitable.
A moocher
@Foregone Conclusion: Hyper inflation is bad. Disguised inflation is a conscious tool to favour capital over labour. It is theft on a scale almost inconceivable. The only problem with stangling the perpetrators in their own entrails while shoots of bamboo slowly impale them is that is far and away too short, mild and merciful a punishment when measured on the scale of the misery and ruination that they have perpetrated on billions for generations.
redshirt
@Gin & Tonic: I hear ya. But when the choice is State U versus an Ivy, why wouldn’t you go for the gold if you could? The Financial Aid system at the time was perfectly designed to ensure I had to pay dearly for the honor.
I’ve paid off the debt, and I’m not whining necessarily (though a bit), but rather I’m bemoaning a system which ensures a large percentage of the college educated work force is in debt the moment they leave college. Add in ridiculous housing costs and debt becomes the norm. Debt is a form of indentured servitude.
Bmaccnm
@Gin & Tonic: I tend to agree. I took on a small amount of debt to become a nurse practitioner- I have the opportunity to pay it back. My son is training to be an archeologist- he’s done lots of field work even as an undergrad, and has a clear idea of what he’s getting into. He is going slowly and paying cash for school, because all the working archeologists he knows have counseled him not to incur any debt for it. I also have trouble with people going to the “best” school and then whimpering about debt. I also took a few years to hitchhike around the US and Australia before college, and worked a bunch of minimum wage scut jobs. That experience has made me a better nurse, because I have a realistic understanding of my patients’s lives.
redshirt
Pile on! Whimpering!
Davis X. Machina
@wapsie: Real wealth came not from practicing the banausic arts, but from worming yourself into the innards of the administration — and that meant the Church-court nexus. There might be money in law, or medicine, but no land.
Gretchen
@raven:
Why was it a ripoff? Library science or Pratt?
Metrosexual Manichean Monster DougJ
@Redleg:
Thanks, and keep on fighting!
gene108
@Scout211:
As college enrollments keep increasing, universities have to find ways to fund that growth.
On-line classes are very cost-effective in that regards.
I’m not sure I would call all on-line courses a waste.
I took two “distance learning” macro-and-micro economics courses at the local community college, when I made up my mind to switch into accounting about 10 years ago. The delivery format wasn’t on-line, like it is now, i.e. no web-based lectures or assignments, but the idea was the same – teach students, without a classroom.
Also, I think the push away or towards liberal arts degrees comes largely from a person’s family. Some families view college as a training ground for future occupations and won’t encourage their kids to do anything that doesn’t lead towards a professional career.
Maybe universities are just seeing an emphasis in what parents are demanding from their children.
Chris
@A moocher:
Not necessarily, inflation favours debtors and punishes lenders, who are often Capital. One way to help our debt deflation situation and our shackled workers is to ease their repayment pain with slight inflation over a deflationary pressure which will destroy them
JCT
@redshirt: I had exactly this choice and since I was lucky enough to live in California I had the option to go to Cal for free and took it. I had to have a job during school, but it gave me the freedom to do whatever I wanted after college.
Probably one of the biggest arguments I had with my husband was whether we should pay for the kids’ college in full or let them do what I did. He won that one and we saved and let them go wherever they were accepted. In retrospect, now that my eldest has graduated into this rough economy I’m glad that we did this. Our state university was nowhere near as good as the Univ of California and at least now my daughter can have some flexibility in her next step without being hobbled by debt. But not everyone has this option.
But back then it was some argument….
And my husband and I are both university professors, I’ll save my rant about the state of education for another day…
A moocher
@Chris: @Chris: I don’t know that we are talking about the same things. Textbook inflation of the sort you describe has the effect you claim. My point was more that the obsession with controlling “inflation” as measured by central banks as a way to keep COL indices low, now matter the consequences for unemployment, is a tool of class warfare. It is one of the ways that productivity gains are transferred upwards. The obsession with controlling inflation is simply a means to disorganise labour and reduce wages. It is otherwise inexplicable, to my way of thinking. I
Roger Moore
@A moocher:
I don’t think it’s that exactly. Inflation, and especially uncertainty about inflation, favors tangible assets, like businesses or real estate, over purely financial assets, like cash or bonds. After all, inflation affects the price of those tangible assets just as it does other goods, but it doesn’t automatically increase the value of financial assets in the same way. OTOH, financial assets are generally denominated in nominal value and have an adjustment for expected inflation baked into that nominal value, e.g. the interest rate of a loan is partly there to offset the loss of principal value to inflation. If inflation drops below the expected value baked into the nominal value of a financial asset, the real value goes up, so people who hold financial assets have a strong desire to see inflation go below the anticipated value. IOW, nobody likes low inflation more than a banker holding a bunch of loans made when inflation was high.