Links for 9/22/09

Robert J. Nash:

more than 90 percent of higher education is built on the teaching function of its workers. Shouldn’t we, therefore, avoid sending the message to our constituents that the university would be a great place to work if only there were no students there to interrupt what’s really important — our research, intra-mural politicking, grantsmanship, and committee work?

• The publish-or-perish reward syndrome on college campuses today is the major cause of the retreat from effective and innovative teaching and learning.

Kevin Carey on HE having its cake and eating it too:

the law allows states to require private colleges to provide “appropriate information,” the best way for states to do that is to require private colleges to provide appropriate information via a longitudinal data system, which this provision explicitly prohibits. This leaves states in the position of having to ask for information via separate, cumbersome, information-deficient forms, which private colleges will then complain about on the grounds of burdensome administrative expense...

the worst kind of having-it-both-ways: asking the government for money but refusing to be accountable for how the money is spent or whether it actually helps students finish college.

Edububble on debt holding back a nun:

she can’t take a vow of poverty until she crawls out of a hole that’s sort of like negative poverty. When you’re in debt you’ve got less than nothing. She got to get $94,000 before she can have nothing.

Charlotte Allen:

That sort of attitude---that if you have a postgraduate degree, you're too good to do any other kind of work except teach in a college setting---is the precise reason why adjunct professors are systematically exploited by the colleges that hire them.

Paul Basken:

Federal auditors are raising new questions about the rush by universities and government agencies to build hundreds of new high-security laboratories to study biological pathogens.

Federal officials encouraged the expansion of the labs after the anthrax attacks in 2001…

But the U.S. Government Accountability Office, in a report to Congress released Monday, said various agencies of the federal government have been encouraging the lab expansion since 2001 without making a comprehensive assessment of the needs and risks.

AG: Why does the rush to implement huge new, expensive, and fairly irreversible programs based on unquestioned assumptions sound so familiar?