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There are many, many things wrong with the way universities are run. Below are a few thoughts I had earlier, please feel free to chime in with an opinion.
1. Tenure - Lifetime job security is the antithesis of competition. Competition leads to productivity and higher job performance.
Example: The University of Colorado professor who taught his students that the United States provoked the 9/11 attacks. CU refused to fire him, citing tenure, until the public scrutiny just got to be too much for them to bear. Ward Churchill September 11 attacks essay controversy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
University presidents have no power - all the major decisions are made by faculty. Collective decision-making by hundreds of prima donnas, none of whom can be fired or even demoted for being wrong, is not a system that any other institution has adopted anywhere else in the world. It is like Congress without elections -- a formula for total irresponsibility and self-indulgence.
2. College Athletics - If you want to see slave labor in action in 2012, look no further than college football. These student athletes bring in billions of dollars of revenue to the schools, to the television networks, yet they are entirely unpaid. Why? So that college athletics can keep its tax-exempt status. Unlike baseball, the NFL does not want to run a minor league. So they farm the work out to the universities, and everybody makes money. Everybody except, of course, the kids doing the actual labor.
Example: O'Bannon v. NCAA could impact more than video games - Michael McCann - SI.com
3. Scandals in College Athletics - The last point reminds me of this point. College athletes are not subjected to the same academic standards as other students. The University of North Carolina was recently found to have been giving out free "A's" to football players in an African American Studies course. Too bad the players never actually attended the courses.
But what really takes the cake is the Penn State scandal. Here you had nearly a decade of disgusting child abuse, which was knowingly covered up by the university. The Freeh Report on Pennsylvania State University | Judge Louis Freeh investigation on PSU
I know of only two elitist, closed societies capable of such a coverup.... academia and the catholic church.
4. Other coverups - It doesn't begin and end with athletes. A study conducted in 2009 found that many colleges were covering up the number of rapes on campus in order to make their campus appear safer and more attractive to parents. This is, in fact, a pattern: Campus Rape Victims: A Struggle For Justice : NPR
5. Grad Students - But let's get off the topic of coverups, and get back on the topic of slave labor. Big-name universities will lavish six-figure salaries on deconstructionist professors whose chief claim to fame is that other deconstructionist professors like them, while freshmen are being taught by low-budget graduate students, many of whom are from foreign countries and do not speak intelligible English.
That is why hundreds of students can be packed like sardines into a huge lecture hall for Economics 1, taught by some junior faculty member without enough clout to get out of teaching anything so elementary.
Meanwhile, some senior professor in the same department may hold a little boutique seminar for six in his pet sub-specialty, far off the beaten track from anything that undergraduates need to know.
When budget-crunch time comes, two classes of Economics 1 with 400 students each may be more likely to be combined into one class with 800 students than is the big-name professor's seminar to be touched.
6. University Admissions - They are just plain unfair, and do not reward achievement. For example, why do universities have legacy admissions? Who cares if your uncle attended Harvard, or if your mother attended Princeton? That should have nothing at all to do with whether you are admitted.
Then you have race and gender quotas. Rather than being admitted purely on academic merit, students are admitted due to the melanin count in their skin or their genitalia.
I haven't even mentioned the number of foreign students. Why should American taxpayers subsidize the education of a student from India or Korea?
Next, you have people with money. If you have money, you can get in anywhere, regardless of how dumb you are.
7. University Tuition - College tuition is just ridiculous. It is the most expensive thing most families will ever pay for aside from their home. It's the number one reason young people will go in to debt when they're starting out. In the past year alone, tuition for four-year public universities rose 8.3 percent for in-state students and 5.7 percent for out-of-state students. Why is that? Because they are run so inefficiently.
Ronald Ehrenberg, a labor economist at Cornell, cited “the shared system of governance between trustees, administrators, and faculty” at many universities, which “guarantees that ... institutions will be slow to react to cost pressures.”
http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ffp0005s.pdf
8. Research Grant Funding - Research grant funding is a must to keep a scientific projects advancing. It costs money for materials and equipment in addition to personnel to undertake a research project.
Now, private money is private money, and I'm not really concerned about that.
Who gets the public money and why? As a taxpayer, I feel this process should be transparent and that I should have some input, along with other taxpayers. Instead, this process is farmed out to various government agencies who clearly have political agendas.
Funding of science - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
9. Wasteful Spending - This goofy grand funding process leads to a lot of studies being done that are simply a waste of money. But don't worry, Americans aren't the only ones. A group of Japanese scientists, led by a professor Yuki Sugiyama of Nagoya University, recently determined the reason commuters are occasionally caught in traffic jams is because there are too many cars on the road.
Groundbreaking stuff.
10. Left-wing Politics - Universities are the nerve center for liberal thought and liberal politics. The vastly disproportionate presence of leftist professors on university campuses across the United States has been well documented. One of the more significant studies on this subject was conducted in 2003 by the Center for the Study of Popular Culture (CSPC), which examined the ratio of registered Democrats to registered Republicans on the faculties of 32 elite colleges and universities nationwide.
In its examinations of more than 150 departments and upper-level administrations at the 32 elite colleges and universities, the CSPC found that the overall ratio of registered Democrats to registered Republicans was more than 10 to 1 (1397 Democrats, 134 Republicans).
1. Tenure - Lifetime job security is the antithesis of competition. Competition leads to productivity and higher job performance.
Example: The University of Colorado professor who taught his students that the United States provoked the 9/11 attacks. CU refused to fire him, citing tenure, until the public scrutiny just got to be too much for them to bear. Ward Churchill September 11 attacks essay controversy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
University presidents have no power - all the major decisions are made by faculty. Collective decision-making by hundreds of prima donnas, none of whom can be fired or even demoted for being wrong, is not a system that any other institution has adopted anywhere else in the world. It is like Congress without elections -- a formula for total irresponsibility and self-indulgence.
2. College Athletics - If you want to see slave labor in action in 2012, look no further than college football. These student athletes bring in billions of dollars of revenue to the schools, to the television networks, yet they are entirely unpaid. Why? So that college athletics can keep its tax-exempt status. Unlike baseball, the NFL does not want to run a minor league. So they farm the work out to the universities, and everybody makes money. Everybody except, of course, the kids doing the actual labor.
Example: O'Bannon v. NCAA could impact more than video games - Michael McCann - SI.com
3. Scandals in College Athletics - The last point reminds me of this point. College athletes are not subjected to the same academic standards as other students. The University of North Carolina was recently found to have been giving out free "A's" to football players in an African American Studies course. Too bad the players never actually attended the courses.
But what really takes the cake is the Penn State scandal. Here you had nearly a decade of disgusting child abuse, which was knowingly covered up by the university. The Freeh Report on Pennsylvania State University | Judge Louis Freeh investigation on PSU
I know of only two elitist, closed societies capable of such a coverup.... academia and the catholic church.
4. Other coverups - It doesn't begin and end with athletes. A study conducted in 2009 found that many colleges were covering up the number of rapes on campus in order to make their campus appear safer and more attractive to parents. This is, in fact, a pattern: Campus Rape Victims: A Struggle For Justice : NPR
5. Grad Students - But let's get off the topic of coverups, and get back on the topic of slave labor. Big-name universities will lavish six-figure salaries on deconstructionist professors whose chief claim to fame is that other deconstructionist professors like them, while freshmen are being taught by low-budget graduate students, many of whom are from foreign countries and do not speak intelligible English.
That is why hundreds of students can be packed like sardines into a huge lecture hall for Economics 1, taught by some junior faculty member without enough clout to get out of teaching anything so elementary.
Meanwhile, some senior professor in the same department may hold a little boutique seminar for six in his pet sub-specialty, far off the beaten track from anything that undergraduates need to know.
When budget-crunch time comes, two classes of Economics 1 with 400 students each may be more likely to be combined into one class with 800 students than is the big-name professor's seminar to be touched.
6. University Admissions - They are just plain unfair, and do not reward achievement. For example, why do universities have legacy admissions? Who cares if your uncle attended Harvard, or if your mother attended Princeton? That should have nothing at all to do with whether you are admitted.
Then you have race and gender quotas. Rather than being admitted purely on academic merit, students are admitted due to the melanin count in their skin or their genitalia.
I haven't even mentioned the number of foreign students. Why should American taxpayers subsidize the education of a student from India or Korea?
Next, you have people with money. If you have money, you can get in anywhere, regardless of how dumb you are.
7. University Tuition - College tuition is just ridiculous. It is the most expensive thing most families will ever pay for aside from their home. It's the number one reason young people will go in to debt when they're starting out. In the past year alone, tuition for four-year public universities rose 8.3 percent for in-state students and 5.7 percent for out-of-state students. Why is that? Because they are run so inefficiently.
Ronald Ehrenberg, a labor economist at Cornell, cited “the shared system of governance between trustees, administrators, and faculty” at many universities, which “guarantees that ... institutions will be slow to react to cost pressures.”
http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ffp0005s.pdf
8. Research Grant Funding - Research grant funding is a must to keep a scientific projects advancing. It costs money for materials and equipment in addition to personnel to undertake a research project.
Now, private money is private money, and I'm not really concerned about that.
Who gets the public money and why? As a taxpayer, I feel this process should be transparent and that I should have some input, along with other taxpayers. Instead, this process is farmed out to various government agencies who clearly have political agendas.
Funding of science - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
9. Wasteful Spending - This goofy grand funding process leads to a lot of studies being done that are simply a waste of money. But don't worry, Americans aren't the only ones. A group of Japanese scientists, led by a professor Yuki Sugiyama of Nagoya University, recently determined the reason commuters are occasionally caught in traffic jams is because there are too many cars on the road.
Groundbreaking stuff.
10. Left-wing Politics - Universities are the nerve center for liberal thought and liberal politics. The vastly disproportionate presence of leftist professors on university campuses across the United States has been well documented. One of the more significant studies on this subject was conducted in 2003 by the Center for the Study of Popular Culture (CSPC), which examined the ratio of registered Democrats to registered Republicans on the faculties of 32 elite colleges and universities nationwide.
In its examinations of more than 150 departments and upper-level administrations at the 32 elite colleges and universities, the CSPC found that the overall ratio of registered Democrats to registered Republicans was more than 10 to 1 (1397 Democrats, 134 Republicans).
