MIT Makes Gains in Treatment of Female Professors

And those colleagues are not entirely clueless. As a grant applicant, grantee, reviewer and panelist I can only confirm that for women faculty it is easier to get funding.

But then you know that your reports are only advisory to the program officers.

Perhaps it is easier to get funding if you THINK you are a woman. Perhaps women propose better ideas to better sources with better expression. Perhaps the genders are basically competing sports teams and the men are irritated when the other team–women–wins. There is lots of research that people who do a good job get promoted slower and less than people who do a for-show job and work really hard to get promoted. Perhaps women do a good job too much and now are learning to be superficial about good job doing and hard-nosed about promotion-seeking, so women and men are now equally for-show? Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps—neither women nor men are capable of deep broad intelligence but only a trio of two women and one man (to equality the for-show stuff) can make intelligent decisions and designs. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.

I have no reason to defend Gov. Romney. But, um, President Obama is clearly in the pocket of Harvard and the University of California, which are corporations and also his biggest donors in the 2008 cycle. So there’s bad-faith education policy in enough supply to go around. I’d like to see us take on the elite non-profit universities with as much disdain and righteous indignation as we show toward for-profits. They are all overpriced private enterprises that abuse federal taxpayer money to crown their handpicked elites with special privileges. The main difference is that Ivy League elitists actually run the world (and badly).

I witnessed first-hand Mitt Romney’s assult on public higher education in Massachusetts.  I was a respected and valued professor at Bridgewater State College (Now Bridgewater State University) during his tenure as governor.  With the high cost of living in the Boston area and my low salary, our family actually qualified for food stamps.  Because salaries were not competitive many state institutions were not able to attract or retain quality faculty.  I myself left for a university in Michigan where the cost of living was significantly less and where I received a substantial increase in salary.  Governor Romney worked hard to dismantle our faculty union, and to divide the state college and university system.  A simple Google search will reveal many articles, etc. that detail his assult.  This must become a campaign issue as we move forward.

Come on Jaz, is that that best you can do?  I love your conflated, red-herring argument.  “We” Republicans (not that your verbiage is marginalizing “us” as a peculiar and detestable segment of the general population or anything.  No, no, liberals don’t do that.  Only Republicans engage in such rhetoric) do not find higher education “largely esoteric” but as a valuable and oft necessary vehicle/springboard to “succeed in [our] respective careers.”

Attempts to reform higher education is not questioning the natural value of advanced education (though that too needs to be addressed.  See “Declining By Degrees” and “Academically Adrift”), but more about how to provide it in a costly way (education cannot be free.  Study the early years of the California system.  What caused the change in the philosophy and practice on the cost of education?  Can you really place a dollar value on knowledge?).  What system of financial support has ever worked (asked sardonically)?  As a back-bench, armchair quarterback, what substantive solution(s) do you offer (expressed mockingly and tauntingly)?

Personally, I think the number of required credits need to be radically reduced, thus limiting the amount of actual time spent in college accruing debt.  I mean, honestly, that dance class I took to satisfy my fine-arts requirement was a waste of my time and money.  And don’t get me started on my French courses…  Oh right, we need to make sure that we’re a culturally aware society (as if I care anything about the Mona Lisa) blah, blah, blah.  Having a masters degree in social work and a PhD in educational administration and policy studies, I’ve been inundated by the “liberal” liberal-arts argument.  I just don’t see any demonstrative evidence supporting this claim (obviously it didn’t work with the Occupy folks who have been so warmly embraced by the academic community.)  I also think a matrix system of charging students on the actual value of their degree.  For example, since a business degree has a greater earning potential than, oh, a degree in Russian Literature, the biz student should pay more.  Yes, this would cause a trickle-up effect on professors’ salaries etc. etc….

I have a few more reformation ideas but I will hold onto them until you provide some intellectual evidence you are willing to have a substantive discussion.  But let us return to your shallow, empty, and thoughtless bumper-sticker comment.  You make tinny-minted assertions that are fallacious at best and proceed to further evidence your poor insight by offering no kind of solution (typical of a liberal drone).  You excoriate Romney and “Republicans” for “our” higher educational reformation ideas/attempts, but fail to share how you (or anyone) would address the bleeding system.  What liberal policy/legislation EFFECTIVELY meets the rising needs of higher education?  Borrowing Frank Donoghue’s glass ball I can already see you typing “more money…” which of course comes from the newly created iCloud-bank.

This is a wonderful piece of rhetoric (“replace archaic siloed structures”)–a combination of stump speech (“we must effect change with a firm hand on costs”) and thinly guised advertisement for money-making* schools (“a robust market for the for-profits, some of which have figured out how to do a better job of meeting students’ and employers’ needs”). But a few points need clarification:

Why the sympathy for “even pragmatic politicians” (who often sound off on education policy as much as Professor Donoghue does) who “find themselves relying on fundamental ideological principles,” and none for Professor Donoghue’s “being guided by his own ideological biases”?

Why, if the question Professor Donoghue raises is “unanswerable,” does betterschool begin the next paragraph with “It is unquestionably in the public interest to…”?

What, exactly are these wonderful-sounding “modern cooperative and constructively competitive counterparts,” and what is “constructively competitive” as opposed to cut-throat competitive?

What’s with this campaign against “elite,” e.g. betterschool’s objection to Obama’s experience with “elite” institutions, and Newt Gingrich’s by-now-routine barbs cast at the “elite” media? Don’t all the teams in the NBA want to get to be considered one of the “elite” teams? Don’t we want physics professors to be among the “elite” in their field? Don’t business travelers want to rack up enough miles to get into the “elite” categories on their favorite airlines. Doesn’t betterschool run one of the “elite” educational think-tanks in the country?

And what are “semi-elite” institutions (which I take to mean colleges and universities) and how many are we talking about? Is San Diego State University one of them? Carelton College? St. John’s University? The University of Montana? Are they every post-secondary school except community colleges?

I’ll be argumentative here: The “better job” that the money-making schools have figured out how to do is mostly to gorge on borrowed tuition money from their students, pay everybody in the company (except faculty, usually) a nice profit from it, and then let the borrowing students–and the gullible Government which grants the loans–stew in their own juices of debt. Yes, a few do a good job, but it’s scarily the biggies, such as the University of Phoenix and Kaplan, that are continually the objects of a plethora of student complaints.

What does a suitable rate of “efficiency” for non-profit colleges and universities consist, in the eyes of betterschool? An even thinner skeleton crew of tenure-track faculty and an even bigger sea of underpaid adjuncts? All distance learning and no undergraduate residency? All vocational ed and STEM fields and no philosophy, history, literature, the arts? No quads and all strip malls?

Finally, an obversation: Professor Donoghue’s post contains some meat–actual names, some figures, an account with some detail concerning Mr. Romney’s history of implementing policy in higher education, and the connecting of specific dots. Betterschool provides almost none of these things. Betterschool may throw adjectives such as “thin,” “unsophisticated,” and “sophomoric,” but they seem to come from a quiver of his own ideological bias (in favor of money-making schools, with a veneer of non-partisan language) as much as Professor Donoghue’s allegedly come from his. Myself, I’d give betterschool an A for rhetoric (30 percent of the grade) and a D for substantial content. I wonder what Professor Donoghue, a real professor of English at a school that betterschool would probably disdain as “elite,” would give it?

* Yes, I know that “for-profit” is the preferred, antiseptic term.

If the author had done a bit more research, he’d have learned that, as governor, Romney declined on multiple occasions to fund the contracts that the fifteen Massachusetts Community Colleges had negotiated with management and that the Legislature had sent him to sign.  Supporting public higher ed is clearly not one of Romney’s priorities.

Betsy Smith/Adjunct Professor of ESL/Cape Cod Community College

Just a thought, but why didn’t you take as much time looking at Mr.Obama’s educational standings when he was running for president? Or did you?

“I’m not very concerned for the very poor – they have a safety net.”

- a certain politician who has never known any form of deprivation or hardship in his life

 I don’t know if I would call it synergy, but I can see a basis for the correlation.  It’s hard to become an athletic powerhouse without strong and consistent alumni involvement, and it’s hard to build a large base of alums with money to throw around without strong academics.  Synergy would suggest that academics to benefit from athletics to a similar degree.

Well, it may be true that SEC universities do not hire PhDs from the Ivy League (a “lesser” conference).  But is that because the Ivy League is a lesser conference, or perhaps, because the Ivy PhDs go elsewhere?  Perhaps in some case of conference correlations of faculty hiring, lesser is more?

John Thelin
University of Kentucky (an SEC member university)

Most top football schools “hire” players with considerable “scholarships,” who have very different profiles from those of the genuine scholars who attend. Their graduation rate is abysmal, partly because their preparation is in football and not academics, partly because of the time and energy they expend in football, and partly because their ambition is to become professional football players, not lawyers or doctors or scientists or English teachers.
Robert Hutchins had it right. Some years after he had closed down the University of Chicago’s Big Ten football program, some reporters asked him if he planned ever to reinstate football. He replied, “If I ever do, I’ll buy the Chicago Bears.”

The longer I think about the place of athletics in academia and the more I research the
topic the more complex the issues seem to be. One way I have come to simplify
the situation is to admit to the fact that, as Mr. Bissinger notes, college
athletics is a tiered system.  For state universities the place on the athletic tier and the place on the academic tier are often very compatible and often comes down to money.

So, as an initial way to consider the place of college athletics and football in particular is to follow the money and see where it comes from and where it goes. Consider the admittedly few financially successful schools. Let’s take just two from the Big Ten for example – Michigan and Ohio State. Both have self-sustaining athletic programs driven primarily by revenues associated with football and men’s basketball. Michigan sponsors 13 men’s sports and 14 women’s sports. Ohio State sponsors 17 men’s sports and 18 women’s sports. Clearly proceeds from two sports are enabling a large number of students to attend each university who might otherwise not have the opportunity or interest and perhaps the case can be made that this contributes to the academic reputation of the institution. By this criterion there is little defense for the decision that has been made by the University of Maryland.

This observation does lead to the proposition that the work of a few men is generating
big bucks for the schools and supporting other athletes and that those men are being exploited. For the sake of argument I reject that position. Not only are hose men getting access to a valuable education but, and I’ve not seen this discussed, they are getting specialized training and a chance to develop physical skills that will enable them, if they are talented enough to make a living playing the sport. This is not nearly as true for basketball as it is for football, but does anyone really believe that Tim Tebow was physically ready to play pro ball when he came out of Nease High School? I saw him play his senior year – even superman needed some development and U of Florida provided that chance in a high caliber physical facility under the tutelage of skilled trainers and coaches.

However, I question the model for universities at the next level both in terms of the reputations for athletics and academics .  Let’s consider the University of Central Florida. In terms of student enrollment it is one of the 3 largest universities in the country and it seems to want its athletic program to fit in with schools like Texas and Ohio State. In 2010 44% of its operating income for athletics came from student fees with an additional 6% coming from the university and from FY 2005-2006 through FY 2009-2010 the UCF athletic program received yearly direct support from the state of between $345,000 and $600,000. Despite these subsidies the athletic program had a cumulative deficit of $2.9 million dollars when operating revenues are compared to operating expenses.  UCF supports 6 men’s sports and 8 women’s sports. As we move to a lower tier then it seems that the opportunities for student athletes also diminish although students are being called on to bear more of the cost of the program and in the case of UCF state funds that could otherwise go to the academic budget are being spent on athletics.  If anything I think that this hurts the academic reputation of this type of school.

That is not entirely true. It is true that student-athletes have access to academic staff, advisors and tutors that help them manage their time and help them with readings, paper drafts, etc. However, non-athletes have access to a different pool of departmental and general tutoring services that student-athletes don’t because of their travel and practice schedules. When you take into account the academic negatives associated with sport (missed class for travel, no time in afternoon to meet faculty or TAs,  lack of energy after practice) and add in the fact that a certain percentage of these student-athletes have far lower academic indexes than general student body, I don’t think the academic support provided does much more than level the academic playing field. Even 3.7 gpa pre-med student-athletes struggle because of the burdens of their sport. Student-athlete grad rates (with excpetion of men’s basketball) are impressive despite this academic support.

What seems to be getting lost in the discussion is that schools with both strong academic and football profiles established their academic profiles before the costs for football programs began escalating in response to media hype and the NFL’s hugely successful campaign to become “America’s Sport”.  Schools that have come on the scene later (such as the aforementioned UCF) are too new to have established an entrenched alumni base and so have not fared well at all when trying to get in on the game.  In the past, football prominence may have helped some schools gain national name recognition that in turn may have enhanced their academic profiles, but that hasn’t been the case since the associated costs for coaches and facilities began perniciously draining campus resources that otherwise would have been applied to academic enterprise.  As for operating expense, it is never clear how much of the cost is hidden (salaries for liaisons, release time for faculty who serve on boards, offices for compliance personnel, facilities maintenance, extra attorneys in the legal office, etc).  The increased use of adjunct faculty alone would indicate a lot of resources are being channeled away from instruction for other purposes, one of which just might be big time athletics?

Yet again V-P Fant evinces unfamiliarity with English.   For example, he writes ADVOCATED FOR THE ELIMINATION rather than ADVOCATED THE ELIMINATION.   He writes ARGUING AGAINST THE FLAGSHIP SO MUCH AS HE IS ARGUING THAT rather than ARGUING AGAINST THE FLAGSHIP SO MUCH AS ARGUING THAT.

Perhaps at his “university” grammar counts for nothing.   Clearly, Mr. Fant’s professional success at Union University has not been impeded.   But his employer, not to mention the CHRONICLE, should politely suggest to him that he master basic English, which I assume is the sole language he commands.

And please:   SYNERGY is so overworked a term that the use of it makes anyone sensitive to treit talk blush.

DS