....Democrats will send Vice President Joe Biden to State College on Tuesday to rally young voters at Penn State event.
In a worst-case scenario [next year], if the federal-stimulus funds disappear and the resulting hole goes completely unfilled, Penn State could face "the most significant budget cuts in our history," Spanier said.Graham didn't see fit to mention this little fact in his latest propaganda film. You would think that a film ostensibly about the state of the university would work that in somehow. But no, it was all ponies, rainbows and empty pride. By the way, I wonder if Graham bribed Micheal Bérubé with the promise of unlimited ice-time to get him to debase himself in that film.
In the employment tables in this report, the “Administration” column consists of the IPEDS categories of “Administration/Executive” and “Other Professionals.”Other Professionals clearly fall within an administrative category because they are defi ned by IPEDS as “persons employed for the primary purpose of performing academic support, student service, and institutional support…. Included in this category are all employees holding titles such as business operations specialists;buyers and purchasing agents; human resources, training, and labor relations specialists; management analysts; meeting and convention planners; miscellaneous business operations specialists; financial specialists; accountants and auditors; budget analysts; financial analysts and advisers; financial examiners; loan counselors and officers; [etc.].” Under any reasonable defi nition, these employees are engaged in administrative functions but clearly not directly engaged in teaching, research or service.
[...]
Unfortunately, the spending categories in IPEDS are not identical to the employment categories, but we have done our best to map them into similar groupings. For the expenditure tables in this report, the “Administration” spending consists of the “Academic Support,” “Institutional Support,” and “Student Services” categories in IPEDS.
"It's something that Penn Staters should be proud of," Penn State [Bullshit Artist] Geoff Rushton said. "It uses scientific criteria that measures how universities impact the nation, and Penn State has done very well. "Geoff had to know that the Pell Grant percentage was off by just shy of a factor of two , yet he was counseling pride on the part of Penn Staters. I'll cut him some slack since empty pride is the Penn State way and even empty pride can be used to separate gullible alumni from their money.
"I have to say that rankings as a whole are something that we don't take too seriously," [Penn State Bullshit Artist Annemarie] Mountz said. "We don't look for ways to rise in the rankings."Not too seriously, Annemarie? Why does Penn State maintain a Web site Where We Stand:Current Rankings? The site,which was updated last month, still has the 2009 Washington Monthly ranking and not the 2010 ranking. Why is that? You and Graham have to know that the 2009 ranking, like all of that magazine rankings before this year, is based on a too high Pell Grant percentage for Penn State. It's a lie to leave it up.
Dickinson School of Law (DSL) is being offered a $60-plus million new home on the Penn State campus in State College if the university's board of governors agrees to forsake Carlisle.Penn State was willing to spend $60 million to boost DSL's US News and World Report ranking and ultimately it spent an unknown amount in a legal fees and a pr campaign to abrogate the original merger agreement and to win the right to build a second campus at University Park at the cost of having to renovate the Carlisle facility. That construction cost $100 million.
Board approval is the only thing that stands in the way of the proposed relocation by fall 2008.
An agreement made when the law school and the state-affiliated university were merged in 1997 says the 169-year-old school will remain in the Carlisle in perpetuity unless the governors vote to go to another site.
In a 28-page memo marked "Confidential For DSL Board Members Only" in preparation for a Nov. 21-22 board meeting, law school Dean Phil McConnaughay tells the board that the university "is prepared to assume the entire cost of a new facility without any repayment" if the law school "completes the design of a new facility within the next 12 months."
The crux of the dean's argument favoring an exodus from the borough is strongly rooted in U.S. News and World Report magazine's third-tier ranking of the school and "a languishing reputation" that caused "DSL grads" in one firm to inform McConnaughay about "their law firm's decision not to hire any longer from our law school because of our low rank."
Joe Sestak believes Penn State and the other state-related universities in Pennsylvania ought to be more transparent about their spending, the U.S. senatorial nominee said Thursday.Of course, the details matter and I look forward to hearing exactly what Joe has in mind.
"Everybody should be transparent," Sestak, a Democrat, said during a campaign stop at the Centre County Grange Encampment and Fair. "That would discipline a lot of things. ... I think it incentivizes better behavior because it's open."
[...]
But "my take on it is, we just need to know more," Sestak said. He said public calls for government accountability -- in general -- are among the most repeated refrains he hears on the campaign trail.
If elected, Sestak said, he will work on the university-transparency issue. He said it fits into his larger emphasis on encouraging federal-government accountability. That drive for transparency, he said, asks the question: "If you are taking federal money, how transparent are you?"
Everyone getting the same shot you had is problematic, considering disparaties of the original circumstances from which people start (I, myself, was very lucky - caring parents, choosing a major that didn't become obsolete before graduation, remaining relatively healthy.) Government can help remediate some circumstances, particularly of institutional, disadvantage. Support of such policies is one of the family values I inherited from caring parents.
I hope your students learned about unions in their studies, that may be the only way to a better life than that of their parents. The decline of the middleclass parallels the decline of union membership.
The biggest boosts to the "ruling elite" over the last few years have been in the tax code that has fed the growing gap between the top 2% and the bottom 98%, especially the recinding of the "death tax" is particularly amusing, as it is creating a defacto aristocracy. Just watch an episode of BRAVO's NYC Prep.
It's the railing against unions and taxes on the top 2% by the Tea Party, two things that will help people get back in the game, amuses me.
You must really have some "juice" to have the CDT take down the Palin article & comments that the above remarks were posted against ...This one is from three days ago.
What was represented as my original posting was really my fifth posting in a long thread. Hence my compliment to Veblen about getting the original article taken down ... destroying the context of the original remarks.
The mid-20th century suddenly appears to have been a golden age for higher education, said Wendy Brown, a professor of political science at the University of California at Berkeley.This is not a pretty picture, but I think it may be an accurate one.
"That era offered not only literacy but liberal arts to a mass public," Ms. Brown said. "But today that idea is eroding from all sides. Cultural values don't support the liberal arts. Debt-burdened families aren't demanding it. The capitalist state isn't interested in it. Universities aren't funding it."
The danger, Ms. Brown said, is that the public will give up on the idea of educating people for democratic citizenship. Instead, all of public higher education will be essentially vocational in nature, oriented entirely around the market logic of job preparation. Instead of educating whole persons, Ms. Brown warned, universities will be expected to "build human capital," a narrower and more hollow mission.
And faculty members are unlikely to resist those changes at a time when two-thirds of them are on contingent appointments instead of the more secure tenure track, said Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors. They simply do not have enough power within the institution.
During a plenary lecture earlier Thursday, Mr. Nelson, who is also a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said he believes that the era of "incremental state funding for public higher education is basically over." For the foreseeable future, he said, the traditional battles for higher state appropriations are bound to be losing ones.
A several-inches thick document in the possession of A&M System officials contains three key pieces of information for every single faculty member in the 11-university system: their salary, how much external research funding they received and how much money they generated from teaching.This does not begin to measure if students are learning, in fact, it should result in a system in which students are guaranteed to learn less.
The information will allow officials to add the funds generated by a faculty member for teaching and research and subtract that sum from the faculty member's salary. When the document -- essentially a profit-loss statement for faculty members -- is complete, officials hope it will become an effective, lasting tool to help with informed decision-making.
"If you look at what people are saying out there -- first of all, they want accountability," [Frank] Ashley [,the vice chancellor for academic affairs for the A&M System,] said. "It's something that we're really not used to in higher education: For someone questioning whether we're working hard, whether our students are learning. That accountability is going to be with us from now on."
[A]wards of between $2,500 and $10,000 to faculty members based onCan you say grade inflation?
anonymous student evaluations... was implemented at Texas
A&M University [in the fall of 2008] and has been expanded to all
A&M System campuses.
Someone once said:That someone was very wise.
We are way past that now.If the terrorists are smart, they will give up on trying to attack us and just sit back and wait, because eventually our entire country is going to be so stupid that people will start sticking their tongues in wall sockets just to see what electricity tastes like.
