By Professor Doom
It’s pretty clear
something’s up in the economy. The strip mining of our economic system has been
going on for years. Only the tremendous wealth pouring in from the student loan
scam has allowed the devastation which has hammered most every other job field
to skip higher education.
Now, if higher
education were run by stewards, instead of plunderers calling themselves
“leaders,” the immense plenty flowing onto campus would have been saved as
preparation for the lean times ahead. Instead, the “leaders” awarded themselves
splendiferous titles, gigantic salaries, and breathtaking golden parachutes
even for a handful of years of “service” in destroying higher education.
With nothing saved
up, our state institutions are the most vulnerable, as they must rely on an
inflow of tax dollars.
Opposing these
fluctuations are the steady jobs of tenured faculty. Tenure, the supposed “job
for life” is under constant attack, since paying for faculty can really cut
into the money available for the next round of golden parachutes.
Like every other
state, North Dakota has been cutting education funds. Of course, they can fire
tenured faculty when there’s no money, but there’s a little quirk in the laws:
when you fired a tenured faculty member, you have to give him 12 months advance notice.
That’s just no good, so North Dakota
wants to change the rules, with a new law, that if passed, would reduce the termination notice
given to tenured faculty members from at least 12 months to at least
90 days.
I want to point out some details about
this change.
First, tenure is mostly dead. Most college
courses are now taught by sub-minimum wage adjuncts. More and more, it seems tenure is something
admins award to themselves…many institutions give admin control over who gets
it, anyway.
Next, it takes 7 years of flawless
scholarship to get tenure outside of administrative fiat. You have to devote a
good part of your life to a single institution to get tenure, and they can’t
even have the decency to give you fair notice that you’ve wasted your life. A
typical semester is longer than 90 days, so changing this rule means that
students likewise are losing the protection of getting coherent classes.
This second point bears reinforcement:
most semesters start in August, and January. A year’s notice gives the
professor a decent chance to warn his students about a change, so they’re not
going to be cheated out of the class they paid for. Campuses only hire full
time faculty (those few places that do so) in the late summer…a 90 day notice
can really, really, hurt a professor as well as cheat students.
Finally, our institutions of higher
education are run by all these Ph.D.s with administrative degrees…can they
really not plan ahead even a tiny bit? These guys are so inept at budgeting
that they can’t predict the expenses and revenues of old institutions that often quite literally
have a hundred years or more of budgeting experience. We’re supposed to believe
the problem is admin can’t get rid of faculty more quickly?
We really need to find a way to get rid
of the clueless admin running these places more quickly….too bad admins get to
decide what the problem is, and what to do about it, eh?
The North
Dakota system will need to trim about 20 percent from its budget this
year, according to Eric Murphy, president of the Council of College Faculties,
the governance body for the university system.
--in
addition to every campus having a bloated bureaucracy, we also have
uber-bureaucracies soaking up money, like this Council of College Faculties, with 21 members. At least there’s only 1 vice-president in addition to the president.
Hey, I concede the state schools are
seeing their budgets slashed and slashed and slashed again. But this last
decade I’ve watched administrative salaries jump 10% or more every year, I’ve
seen countless admin get fired for gross incompetence, and get rewarded with
$250,000 or more severance packages. I’ve seen faculty positions cut, and class
sizes doubled and doubled and doubled again…and I’ve seen administrative
positions double and double as well.
So, yeah, it’s tough to deal with a 20%
budget cut. But if we trim 20% of the administrative positions, we’ve save much
more money than if we trimmed 40% of the faculty positions, because admin outnumber the faculty, and are paid far more than twice as much. Is there truly nobody in power able
to see how this works?
Even if you only get rid of some faculty,
there should be a commensurate number of administrators fired also…I mean,
there’s less people to administrate, right?
It’s so funny to hear
admin bleat about how their plan makes sense:
From the
administration’s perspective, the 12-month termination notice is financially
unsustainable. “This timeline means that the process of eliminating the
position of a tenured faculty member is generally too lengthy to produce cost
savings within a biennium,” the proposal states. The proposal would allow
campuses to save 75 percent of what they’re paying terminated tenured
faculty members now.
Yes, sure, you
can save 75% of salary with this new plan. But you can save 100% of salary by
firing administrators immediately.
And, again, since they’re paid 2x to 20x as much as faculty, this would
represent a far greater savings. How does anyone fall for the administrators’
argument?
The comments
section, as is so often the case, laughs at the blatant idiocy of the plan:
Wasn't the
Admin charged with managing the system? If they failed, why aren't they getting
90-day notices right now?
Exactly. Why are
the faculty, the tenured faculty who devoted themselves to the schools, paying
the price for the plundering failures who messed up so horribly?
Even if this plan
passes (and it likely will), it will change nothing. Admin will continue to
suck up every penny and then some. A year from now, when they’ve quick-fired
all the tenured faculty and replaced them with adjuncts, there still won’t be enough
money in the system, although there will be another Dean and Vice President
positions filled.
I hesitate to
suggest the following solution, because some administrator might take it
seriously, but here goes:
Next time the
money runs tight, start having classes in the sportsball stadiums. This will allow
class size to balloon from a few hundred a class, to tens of thousands.
Cutting education
costs on this level should pay for some very nice golden parachutes indeed.
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