Links for 3/30/10

Lynn O’Shaughnessy

The University of California is facing its greatest financial crisis of all time, but so far the system has punted in offering real solutions…

Pablo Eisenberg

the revelation in The New York Times that Ruth Simmons, president of Brown University, has been a trustee at Goldman Sachs for 10 years…

For her board work as a trustee in 2009, she was paid $323,539, an enormous sum amounting to more than half of her salary at Brown. She will leave Goldman Sachs later this year with a stock portfolio worth about $4.3 million, a perk granted to board members.
It turns out that Dr. Simmons also sat on two other corporate boards: Pfizer, from which she resigned three years ago, and Texas Instruments, where she remains a trustee. For her service at these two other corporations, she received substantial trustee fees and, presumably, stock or stock options…

While Dr. Simmons did cite the time commitment required for sitting on the Goldman Sachs board as a reason for ending her tenure as a trustee, she did not explain why it took her 10 years to come to this conclusion…

Michael Bugeja

Even as my own institution reorganizes (with departmental budgets reduced by 25, 35, even 50 percent), new courses and degrees keep being added or proposed…

The truth is obvious: Curricular glut affects workload. If a course is in the catalog, someone has to teach it…

The faculty owns the curriculum, so standing committees can act without administrative approval to eliminate and combine courses to decrease workload and add academic rigor…

Tim Ranzetta

Federal Student Loan Program Going 100% Direct; Sallie Mae Share Price Hits 52-Week High