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A Thing about Tenure…

… just caught my eye in the New York Times. I’ll link you to it now. Then I’ll read it and see if I’ve got anything to say…

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Hokay.

Elite private colleges can cost more than $200,000 over four years. Total student-loan debt, at nearly $830 billion, recently surpassed total national credit card debt. Meanwhile, university presidents, who can make upward of $1 million annually, gravely intone that the $50,000 price tag doesn’t even cover the full cost of a year’s education. (Consider the balance a gift!) Then your daughter reports that her history prof is a part-time adjunct, who might be making $1,500 for a semester’s work. There’s something wrong with this picture.

Absolutely. It’s okay for a few courses at extremely expensive colleges to be taught by carefully selected adjuncts and grad students. But more than a few? Scandalous.

[If] colleges are ever going to bend the cost curve, to borrow jargon from the health care debate, it might well be time to think about vetoing Olympic-quality athletic ­facilities and trimming the ranks of administrators.

Uh-huh.

But I dunno. If you read the whole thing, it’s confused. It takes on all sorts of big issues – presidents’ salaries, tenure, athletics, inequality – but doesn’t have the space or the organization to make much sense of them.

Margaret Soltan, September 3, 2010 4:54PM
Posted in: professors

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2 Responses to “A Thing about Tenure…”

  1. theprofessor Says:

    It is a complicated issue. Of course, for the outcomes crowd, it makes no difference whether Susie Student achieves the low, bogus, or essentially unmeasurable outcomes that we have put in place in the class of the grad TA, the underpaid adjunct, a scintillating superstar from the regular faculty, or the regular faculty member who was hired because she happens to be related to several of Mediocrevilleburgton’s movers and shakers.

    On the other hand, the undergrads in my classes when I was an advanced grad student were certainly in better hands with me than the faculty in my area, because the latter were 1) REALLY bored with teaching a big service course; 2) not good “big class” lecturers; 3) no longer masochistic enough to assign much writing in a class with 100+ students.

  2. Michael Says:

    My university’s website notes that our graduates have the second lowest debt load of students “among regional universities in 12 Midwestern states.” And our football coach, who makes less than half what our president makes, answers his own phone. I like teaching here.

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