By Richard Vedder
In a so far successful ploy to stay ahead of my creditors, I have been traveling a lot as of late; last month I was in Kazakhstan, Mexico, and many places in between. Over the weekend, I was therefore reading the Providence, Rhode Island newspaper, and the headlines proclaimed the probable death of 11 academic programs at a couple of schools in that postage stamp sized state.
The Rhode Island higher education coordinating board was poised to decree that programs graduating fewer than 10 or so students annually would be eliminated. Thus the University of Rhode Island would lose its program in Latin American Studies. Horrors!! Citizens of Rhode Island wanting intensive study of Latin America might have to travel the better part of 100 miles to any number of Massachusetts universities offering study in that subject. Big whoop.
To be sure, the number of majors in a study may not always be the perfect metric to use in deciding what programs to eliminate. I gather that the physics department at the University of Rhode Island would be in trouble if the number of graduates rule cited above were strictly followed, and a university without physics is, well, not a university. That said, however, on balance I think it is great that colleges, so over-subsidized in the past, are being forced to make hard choices, the type of choices that both businesses and individuals make regularly.
While they are at it, why don't regents and trustees push universities to use facilities more intensively, for example, by forcing faculty to teach classes on Fridays, in the summer, and in evenings. No one wants to take a Thursday evening class --it cuts into an early start of a weekend of binge drinking. But it is time we start insisting on higher levels of work effort and academic performance from students, more studying, serious academic discourse and class attendance and less partying, texting and fornicating.
Plato had some authoritarian qualities that makes him less than my ideal amongst our classical thinkers, but he was right when he allegedly said necessity is the mother of invention. The pain and suffering most universities are allegedly going through now should have happened years ago. It is time to trim administrative bureaucracies, end vast intercollegiate athletic subsidies, reevaluate the liberal awarding of tenure, consider more use of on-line technology, reduce reliance on expensive four year residential universities, etc. These things are starting to happen, and that is to the good. I suspect, however, that things will revert to normal in a few years. Let us see what happens to Latin American Studies at the University of Rhode Island, for example.
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2 comments:
The Doc is getting to be a real scourge:
"forcing faculty to teach classes on Fridays, in the summer, and in evenings."
Apart from the fact that I am often scheduled to teach on Fridays, and my evenings are often filled with class preparation and the research I'm expected to do, and ditto the summers, I wouldn't mind, as long as I'm well paid.
Of course, the University would have to deal not just with me but with the faculty union that would undoubtedly be voted in -- the unions are already hovering -- if they tried to do this.
caveman - you are a liar. That's right - you are a LIAR. You don't teach anything. If you did, all your students would have to quit college to be treated for clinical depression. What you do is try to bring everyone down to your level of leading a meaningless, miserable, victim-hood existence. You are such a low down, hateful, contemptuous, bitching little girl.
But as I said - you are not a teacher, professor, or anything else that involves dispensing knowledge. Your comments confirm this - you have no knowledge.
So quit pretending you are something that you are not. Put on your pink tutu, move to San Francisco, and join "Code Pink" - if you haven't already.
You're a pretender - you have nothing to offer.
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