Links for 3/26/10

Michael Bassis

each year, after some gnashing of teeth, we opted to set tuition and institutional aid at levels that would maximize our net tuition revenue. Why? We were following conventional wisdom that said that investing more resources translates into higher quality and higher quality attracts more resources…

And most people inside and outside the academy – including those who control influential rating systems of the sort published by U.S. News & World Report -- define academic quality as small classes taught by distinguished faculty, grand campuses with impressive libraries and laboratories, and bright students heavily recruited. Since all of these indicators of quality are costly, my college’s pursuit of quality, like that of so many others, led us to seek more revenue to spend on quality improvements…

the elephant in the room is the cost structure of our academic programs… When quality is defined by those things that require substantial resources, efforts to reduce costs are doomed to failure…

The notion of defining quality in terms of outputs rather than inputs, by the achievements of our graduates rather than the achievements of our entering class, had been a key element in the strategic plan my institution began developing…

we began to change our focus from what we were teaching to what and how our students were learning…

Instead of assuming we needed all of the expensive accouterments of quality, we could focus our attention on those things known to have the most impact on student learning. And it doesn’t take long to discover that, despite claims to the contrary, many of the factors that drive up costs add little value…

I see danger ahead unless we can cut the Gordian knot between cost and quality…

Goldie Blumenstyk

The federal appeals court that handles patent cases has upheld a ruling that could make it harder for universities to obtain patents on the basic research most academics undertake…

"The patent law has always been directed to the 'useful arts,' meaning inventions with a practical use," the judges of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit wrote in the 9-to-2 decision. "Patents are not awarded for academic theories, no matter how groundbreaking or necessary to the later patentable inventions of others."…

"Universities may not have the resources or the inclination to work out the practical implications" of the research they do, the judges wrote, and that might mean universities become 'disadvantaged" when seeking patents. But the appeals court said that was "no failure of the law's interpretation but its intention."…

Robert N. Watson

according to spreadsheet calculations done at my request by Reem Hanna-Harwell, assistant dean of the humanities at the University of California at Los Angeles, based on the latest annual student-credit hours, fee levels, and total general-fund expenditures, the humanities there generate over $59-million in student fees, while spending only $53.5-million (unlike the physical sciences, which came up several million dollars short in that category). The entire teaching staff of Writing Programs, which is absolutely essential to UCLA's educational mission, has been sent firing notices, even though the spreadsheet shows that program generating $4.3-million dollars in fee revenue, at a cost of only $2.4-million.

So, the answer to "Who's going to pay the salary of the English department?" is that the English department at UCLA earns its own salary and more, through the fees paid by its students—profits that will only grow with the increase in student fees…

[AG: Fair enough – would you mind breaking that down by full time tenured professor and adjunct/TA?]