Links for 5/4/10

Tony Bates

any large organization is difficult to manage, and universities particularly so. In fact, the terminology explains why. They’re not called managers or executives in universities but administrators – they are there to serve the main stakeholders in the university (and faculty in particular), not to ‘run’ things. Unfortunately, though, this term ‘administrator’ (which strikes me as being reminiscent of civil servants in colonial England – responsibility without power) is no longer suitable in organizations often with billion dollar budgets facing great challenges, both externally and internally. We need if not professional management, administrators with a high level of managerial and executive skills…

Edububble

universities sit on immense pools of lawyer bait (i.e. cash)...

Scott Jaschik

Bolt and Charlier looked at students who were considered to have "high exposure" to adjuncts (at least 75 percent of first semester courses taught by adjuncts) and "low exposure" (up to 25 percent of courses). About 30 percent of the students were in the low exposure group and about 41 percent were in the high exposure group.

Then Bolt and Charlier tracked student success over three years, looking at two measures of success: fall to fall retention, and program completion (either a degree or a certificate, depending on the student's program). They found absolutely no correlation between adjunct exposure and either of those measures...

Thomas Cranly

I was within hours of spending $600 on 10 law-school applications with the click of a button. But before going home to commit that act of resignation, I absent-mindedly checked my campus mailbox, which contained a letter explaining that my book had been accepted for publication by a university press.

That notice saved me hundreds of dollars in the short term. In the long term, it probably cost me millions. But it kept my peculiar dream to be a faculty member alive...