Professors at the University of Vermont are outraged that the president and board of trustees have just given a $320,000 salary to the recently hired dean of the business school.
$320,000 is way above average for b-school deans, and UVM has only sixty business school students.
And it goes without saying that UVM, like most universities these days, is in big financial trouble, with talk of layoffs, salary freezes, etc.
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Greed and status-mongering. The pillars of the American university.
March 30th, 2011 at 7:50AM
The business of the new corporate university extends far beyond the business school (as UD has observed in other posts). From the Introduction (p. x) to Jennifer Washburn’s groundbreaking book entitled University Inc.: The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education (New York: Basic Books 2005):
“The problem is not university-industry relationships per se; it is the elimination of any clear boundary lines separating academia from commerce. Today, market forces are dictating what is happening in the world of higher education as never before, causing universities to engage in commercial activities unheard of in academia a mere generation ago. Universities now routinely operate complex patenting and licensing operations to market their faculty’s inventions (extracting royalty income and other fees in return). They invest their endowment money in risky start-up firms by their professors. They run their own industrial parks, venture-capital funds, and for-profit companies, and they publish newsletters encouraging faculty members to commercialize their research by going into business.”
For a specific description of this transformation at the University of Minnesota see University Inc. Part II at http://ptable.blogspot.com/2011/02/draft-as-university-transforms-itself.html#links.
March 30th, 2011 at 10:30AM
Yowza–I knew that Vermont was a people’s republic, but only 60 business majors? Wow.