Links for 2/3/10

Erin Einhorn on NYC’s Rubber Rooms

roughly 700 workers accused of various wrongdoings collect their full salaries for spending seven hours a day in low-ceilinged, over-heated rooms, playing cards, doing puzzles, reading magazines and sleeping…

the longest-serving person stuck in a rubber room as a teacher who was accused of sexually abusing a child and yanked from his classroom 5-1/2 years ago.

Because the allegations were never proved, and because he refuses to quit his job, he collects his full annual salary - up to $95,000…

Lewis Pyenson

Paul Courant and his colleagues at the University of Michigan want the federal government to support the research habits of elite public universities… Not so fast.

Elite public research universities have pots of money, which they can and do choose to fritter away on enterprises of dubious value…

creating a special strategy to feather the nests of fancy universities is not a responsible use of federal funds.

It would make much more sense to award federal funds to scholars and scientists individually, wherever they are located…

Scott Jaschik

the "no loan" policies adopted by many colleges three years ago… The plans were financed by endowments that had grown so large and so rapidly that members of Congress were demanding to see more spending. Then came the collapse of the stock market -- and deep declines in endowments…

That's when Williams College -- which had a gold-plated no-loans, no income limit policy -- announced that it was shifting back…

Lafayette College… raised the loan limit it pledged to students with family incomes of between $50,000 and $100,000…

Lee Burdette Williams with a humorous take on tenure.

offered the gift with the stipulation that tenure be abolished, the president told him we could never do such a thing. But $75 million! Imagine turning that down! Carson offered a compromise, which the president, without a second thought as to the consequences, accepted: tenure food services employees in addition to faculty…

I realize now that back in 1985, Carson still harbored a 20-year old grudge against a professor and the institution that was powerless to hold that instructor accountable, and that Carson’s very clever form of revenge was to subject us to more misery than any college, even a small, private, wealthy liberal arts college, deserves…

two tenured line servers who were miserable in their jobs but unable to get hired elsewhere, were woefully out-of-date on current food serving technique and research, and invested the majority of their energy in sabotaging the authority of both the head of serving and the Food Services director. They were a pathetic pair of institutional critics who, in faculty parlance, would be called “dead wood.” In food services, though, they’re known as “salad spinners.”…

Though we enjoyed the fruits of his generous gift, he had taken one of our most sacred institutions, tenure, and skewered it like lamb on a kabob. The joke, we all knew, but never admitted out loud, was on us...