State budget woes have prompted the University of Alabama system to consider cutting about 300 jobs, raising tuition, and cancelling contruction projects, The Birmingham News reports. The job cuts would affect only about 1.2 percent of the system’s 25,000 employees.
Programs in speech pathology, dance, and organizational psychology are on the chopping block at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, according to Knoxnews.com. The university plans to phase out the programs in the next fiscal year to reduce its budget by $11-million.
Who is to blame for the fiscal crisis facing the University of Quebec at Montreal? A “blistering report” blames its former president, the board, and the board of the parent university, among others, for “poor management” of construction projects that cost nearly $750-million, according to The Gazette, a local newspaper.
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10 Responses to Budget Cuts and Layoffs
josgirl13 - September 26, 2011 at 9:57 am
Scrabble doesn’t accept “OK” as a word (darn it). Perhaps its dictionary considers it an abbreviation of “oll korrect,” which is how I understand the derivation. Can you tell us a bit more about Charles Gordon Greene and his “invention” of the great international word/nonword?
allan_metcalf - September 26, 2011 at 12:37 pm
OK – Read all about it in the book linked from my bio (at right), or go to: OKDayMarch23 on Facebook!
JOI Students - September 26, 2011 at 3:13 pm
“OK” has become close to everyday life. Do you think your speech would be alright without “OK”? How many OKs do you say in a day? I think we need another research on that? How many times does it occur in our TV shows, movies?
How is it used in other languages? Does it have similar meaning when get it translated? For me in Nepali language, it could be “la la” for OK. Let me know if it is the WRONG!!
I guess we should study in detail, and email me other research on OKs at center.asu@gmail.com
Guest - September 26, 2011 at 4:27 pm
A-OK to add a touch of non-neutrality.
Chris Marrou - October 2, 2011 at 2:03 pm
But whence comes “oll korrekt”? The spelling makes it seem Germanic, but in German the term would be (literally) “ganz richtig.” Why would OK have appeared at all? The only thing I can compare is the term “MOS” used in early Hollywood and TV, which meant “mit out sound,” a faux Germanism for silent video (in recent years, MOS has become “man on the street,” meaning video of passersby giving their opinions of a major story).
Joe Grobelny - April 5, 2012 at 3:52 pm
Brian, I’m not hatin’ on you, but when you categorize humanities folks as clueless fuddy-duddies, i’m going to let you know it’s not OK.
Brian Mathews @brianmathews:
@JGrobelny @charbooth humanists still upset we ditched card catalog. The future is “reading across materials” not just one artifact at time
Joe Grobelny Joe Grobelny @JGrobelny
@brianmathews @charbooth on both counts, i find that to be untrue of many humanists (DH, for example). haters gonna hate!
2h Brian Mathews Brian Mathews @brianmathews
@JGrobelny @charbooth hate away, I rise above it. I dabble with new things, but “tradition” is very noble– good luck with your efforts
6m Joe Grobelny Joe Grobelny @JGrobelny
@brianmathews you’re hatin’ on humanities folks. digital technologies are artifacts used to work. can’t get away from materiality!
Brian Mathews - April 6, 2012 at 10:46 am
Joe. I was being sarcastic. I consider myself “humanities” folks. I love the humanities and many grads and faculty from those disciplines have shared interest in our digital future. In fact, a VT historian asked me a few weeks ago how the library will evolve in ten years as more scholarly content goes digital — he wants us to offer a digital humanities space– so yeah, I just wanted to flip back to you and say that not all humanities folks are obsessed with print. I think the future of scholarly info is on the verge of new paradigms. Let’s embrace and celebrate that!
Thanks for taking the time to read my blog and twitter. Maybe give me paper a read too? It might not work for you and that’s cool– but I’ve been getting a lot of positive feedback from librarians around the world on this topic– so it resonates– change is happening man, the iceberg is melting.
Have a good weekend and best of luck to you and your library.
mbelvadi - April 6, 2012 at 12:20 pm
I think you’re confusing “creating something new” with “trying something new”. True startups typically create something that is actually really new, something patentable or copyrightable for instance. Academic libraries are rarely creating anything new in that sense, but are often trying out ideas and services that are “new” to themselves, but not to the world at large. Libraries who do actually create entirely new things also usually do so as an addition to their existing traditional services, not in complete replacement of everything they did before. We don’t call a company that adds a new product line a “startup”.
In fact, academic librarians are so conservative generally (original meaning not partisan one), that simply deciding to subscribe to a major “new” product like a ‘discovery’ service from a commercial vendor, or trying out a patron-driven acquisition (PDA) method of selecting books on any significant scale is considered bold and radical by those who propose such changes within their institutions.
Libraries are in fact so deeply interwoven into the academic life of a university that it would be reckless for any library director to actually try to take the kinds of risks with the entire library organization implied by a startup analogy. A large percentage of startups fail completely, and where would that leave your university if the library did that?
Brian Mathews - April 6, 2012 at 1:40 pm
Thanks for your feedback. Good luck with your endeavors.
lkamsin - April 17, 2012 at 11:28 am
Brilliant paper. thought provoking & hopefully, idea/creativity provoking. Worries re: what if it fails? Well, let’s see if a course/program fails then it goes away & is replaced by something “better: What’s wrong with adapting to meet the demand/needs? What’s wrong with a better Library?