… the mass-killer instinct.

Robert Smith, provost at Texas Tech, says, in the Houston Chronicle, that professors at public universities are moonlighting at the for-profits.

… During a panel discussion on “For-Profit Education” at the July 2010 meeting of the Council on Academic Affairs of the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) in Portland, Ore., the president of The Art Institute of Portland and the chief academic officer at the University of Phoenix (UP) were questioned about how many members of their faculties held full-time jobs at public institutions.

… [T]he UP official responded: “Oh, we hire a lot of your faculty,” meaning faculty members in the 188 public institutions represented by APLU.

A follow-up question revolved around measures UP does or does not take to determine if those same public institution employees have permission from their public employers to teach at UP, which has more than 450,000 students, with all but 100,000 taking courses online. The response: “We leave that up to the individual.” Finally, the UP official was asked whether UP would be willing to publish names and addresses of its faculty employees. His reply: “We’ll have to think about that.” [What sort of university doesn’t list its faculty members? In its catalogue?]

… Are the profits of UP and other for-profit institutions coming at the expense of taxpayers — federal and state – as well as parents and students paying tuition at public institutions?

This is a new one on UD, some extra-credit corruption in an already impressively corrupt industry.

No wonder that Cal State Bakersfield professor handling 700 online students in an intro math class had trouble getting many of them to pass the course. The same guy was probably handling 14,000 Phoenix students.

Ellen Schrecker, in Forbes, describes the process whereby tenured professors become contingent instructors who in turn become internet traffic directors.

She begins with a story.

… California State University’s Bakersfield campus decided to cut costs by replacing all the sections of the remedial mathematics course in the fall of 2009 with an online computer program overseen by a single instructor. Unfortunately substituting the Internet for personal contact with a classroom teacher proved disastrous, especially for the 700-plus ill-prepared undergraduates who needed intensive work to bring their math skills to a college level. When these students took their final exams only about 40% passed, compared with a 75% success rate the prior year.

One instructor, 700 students. Online. What could go wrong?