The cracks in the Ivory Tower

I've refrained from airing my dirty laundry about academia, but have hinted I some day may do just that. Suffice to say I support higher education and the need for it but I have no illusions about its current state and the reasons for it. Although buffeted and attacked by outside factors many of the problems in the Ivory Tower, much like my house, are the result of decades of poor planning and self-serving decisions by administration, terrible ethics and outright corruption.

A number of stories before and after the new year caught my attentionbecause they shien a narrow spotlight on some of the compromised structure of American Higher Ed.

In California it has been found that the Los Angeles Community Colleges building program is a mess because of poor management:

“An independent panel looking into the Los Angeles Community College District's troubled rebuilding program found that the nearly $6-billion effort was hampered by a lack of leadership and accountability and that lax controls allowed large numbers of costly changes midway through projects.
The district, for example, spent $39 million to design and start construction on four major buildings at West Los Angeles College, only to cancel the projects for lack of sufficient funds to finish them, The Times found.”

Doug Lederman on InsideHigherEd explores why reform on college athletics is unlikely:

“In a set of interviews with nearly a dozen longtime observers and leaders of big-time college athletics, consensus emerged that given the political, financial and other forces that support and benefit from the current system of big-time college sports, it would take an external “asteroid” of major proportions to bring about truly transformative change (though it was difficult to find consensus on the likelihood of any one such thunderbolt actually happening).
But does anything differentiate the current spate of rule breaking and scandal from previous ones, in a way that might prompt a more dramatic response or suggest that more transformative change might result this time around?
No, argues Murray Sperber, a visiting professor in the Graduate School of Education at the University of California at Berkeley and author of such books at Beer and Circus: How Big-Time College Sports Is Crippling Undergraduate Education. While the rash of recent scandals may seem more widespread or serious than others, “what’s really changed is the Internet, which gives the illusion that there are more scandals,” he says. “The spotlight has gotten a lot more intense. Schools can’t turn it off like they could for generations and generations.”

A report (albeit from another academic institution-UPenn) has found that the State of Washington’s system is “adrift” due to management failures at the top:

In the second installment of a five-state, two-year study, the researchers determined that Washington lags behind most other states in the total number of bachelor’s degrees produced per capita; only 40 of every 100 students who start ninth grade enter college on time; and one-fourth of adults ages 18-64 range have not earned even a high school diploma.
“Performance and Policy in Washington Higher Education” reports that college is becoming less affordable in Washington. From 1999 to 2009, median family incomes declined by 1.9 percent, but tuition increased by 42 percent at public two- year colleges and by 39.5 percent at public four-year colleges and universities.

The University of Illinois System presidential chief of staff has resigned amid an inquiry into whether she sent anonymous e-mails to faculty members with the goal of influencing  them  on policy matters.  The Chicago Tribune reported:

“The university's ethics and information technology offices are looking into whether Troyer, one of the president's chief advisers, was behind two anonymous emails sent in December by "About UIIntegrity." The emails — with the subject line "call for reason and honesty" — tried to influence the University Senates Conference, the primary faculty advisory group to the president, which was debating the contentious issue of enrollment management changes.
The incident comes as the university's leadership has been emphasizing the importance of ethics and positioning itself as the reform administration following an admissions scandal that rocked the state's flagship campus.”

 I tweeted about this, they’re building a new mansion for the UMd president amdist massive budget slashing:

Construction crews are poised to demolish the president’s house at the University of Maryland this week and to pour the foundation for a new 14,000-square-foot on-campus mansion that carries a $7.2 million price tag.
But some question why the school would build such an elaborate house at a time when the flagship university is asking donors to support students who might drop out because they can’t afford tuition. And construction will begin just weeks after President Wallace D. Loh announced that he will cut eight varsity sports teams in June to save an estimated $29 million over the next eight years.” 

The standard line of defense form career academics is that this happens in all institutions.  I call this the GOP defense, because just like the current Republican Party that holds itself out as the protector of "family values" many academics (particularly boomers) crow about how they are above profits and politics and are involved in a nobler pursuit than the rest of society.  In both cases when the truth is revealed we see rank hypocrisy and self-righteousness instead.

College students not learning? What a shock!

From the Department of Stating the Obvious "Study: College Students Not Learning':
"A study of more than 2,300 undergraduates found 45 percent of students show no significant improvement in the key measures of critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing by the end of their sophomore years."

Well what do you expect? Colleges and universities are businesses, with profits and dividends in the form of high paying administrative  positions and lucrative contracts to service providers.  The eternal growth model is also followed, requiring ever increasing enrollments.*  This requires the lowering of admission and achievement standards. If a new faculty member wants to get tenure they better play ball and pass the underachievers, ignore the cheating, plagiarism, and lack of preparation. All should follow the latest education fad, if said fad can be twisted to meet the goal of keeping asses in the seats. Tenured faculty are rewarded with promotion to the ranks of the ever increasing admin. if they play ball. This is now pretty much the modus operandi of many schools, such as the University of Delaware.

Then there is the sales part that is needed for the constant growth model.  The marketing arms push the notion that everyone must attend college. Many jobs still don't require college level skills and the institutions are providing little as it is. The HR people at larger companies are also a problem, they do not understand the duties of many positions being filled and thus use college degrees as a substitute for actual qualifications. I found many years ago that Analog devices would not consider me for an electronic tech position without an Associates in Electrical Engineering, even though that degree provides absolutely none of the practical technician skills the position required The college admissions push also creates a new market for college preparation shysters and funding college provides a boom for the lending industry.

The end result is that higher education is failing in its mission and its heading for a crash.

And its own damn fault.

Distant Thunder

I've hit higher education repeatedly. Our challenges cry out for research and education, but American collegs and universities are increasingly mediocre, overpriced, and smothered by cancerous administration. The situation is unsustainable and we may see a bursting tuition bubble.

A leaked report in Der Spiegel has made the rounds on the internets. Why? It is a German military study of the potentially drastic effects of Peak Oil.

Many stories this week also about a current global food crisis and the connection to climate change. This includes a bad wheat crop in Russia and substantial crop failures in Africa. At the moment the UN dismisses the idea of a global crisis.

On a local level, this has been the hottest summer in 116 years of record keeping in Delaware. By itself that means nothing, but four of the five hottest summers will have occurred in the last 8 years.

Misplaced priorities in Higher Ed, The beat goes on.

The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's athletic program is running an $8 million deficits and students have been charged a fee to support the program. So of course the basketball team is taking a $160,000 trip to Italy. The program claims that the money has been privately donated. Now call me crazy but wouldn't it make more sense to apply those donations to the deficit? IMHO most of these alumni donors/boosters were people who coasted through college partying and rushing and never learned a thing of value - of course they don't care about the academic mission of colleges and universities.

If faculty members nationwide really had any balls or backbone (and the tenured ensconced ones dropped the "I got mine" attitude) there would a massive strike across campuses to force administrations to focus the money where it belongs.

Palin, Payments and Profits

Sarah Palin's speech at CSU Stanislaus in June was controversial not just for the speaker, but because the cash-strapped school shelled out $75,000 in speakers fees and tried to keep the financial details away from scrutiny.
This past week all the gory details were released. Overall the CSU Stanislaus Foundation states ~$257K was spent on the speaker's fees, accommodations and security. Spent by who? Was it out of the foundation's pocket or the University's? The Foundation took in around $473K which after expenses nets $207,000. According to the university, $80,00 of the net proceeds are to go to "student scholarships", but no firm details are provided. This contradicts information provided by the CSUS President and reported here that claims all 207K went to scholarships. What's the deal with that? Furthermore, despite a lot of statements that the foundation is private, their incorporation indicates that they are an auxiliary arm of the University.

But lets' forget Palin for the time being, the speaker doesn't matter. What matters is the way money is brought into universities, how the spoils are divided and how much accountability there is.
OK, first of all, despite some claims, public money may have been used (the details are still vague). If so, the University should get  it back from the foundation, but when? How much of the proceeds actually go to students and how much to administrative overhead? Finally, what is the point of enabling more students to attend when the content of their education will be gutted?
Foundations, alumni groups, athletics and the universities themselves are supposed to be non-profit. But this just means they don't pay dividends or divvy up a surplus. But when you have evergrowing overhead expenses for salaries and benefits for excessive (and expensive) administrators, and you cut money from the educational/research mission to pay those expenses, you are acting like a for-profit entity. Add in the fact that much fundraising (including athletics) exists now to support the fundraisers, and we have an unsustainable situation developing in higher education. Colleges and universities may end up as nothing more than overpriced sports-entertainment-resort complexes with the occasional dumbed down high-school level class to attend.

Misplaced priorities in education.

A private Delaware school, the Red Lion Christian Academy, has been accused of athletic recruiting and playing violations. Then again we shouldn't be surprised given the nature of the school and the parents who choose it. The attitudes of the parents are amazing, one is proud to call herself a "helicopter parent", and the article continues, "Another parent, Michelle Hoffman, who lives in a development adjacent to the Red Lion campus, remembers how moved she was in 2007 when she looked out her windows the night the football stadium lights were on for the first time and saw the cross atop the church through the glow." Are these people for real?

This sad little tale also reminds us that misplaced priorities regarding student athletics starts before the college level.

Higher Ed Woes Part II: Scientist "glut" is an example of how the entrenched ignore the real issues.

It would come as a shock to many non-geologists that many geology departments no longer have faculty who specialize in rocks ( the field of petrology), the constituents of rocks or minerals (mineralogy) and the chemistry involved in the workings of the earth (geochemistry). Specialists in structural geology (folding, faulting etc) and geological time and layering (stratigraphy and sedimentology) are also considered superfluous. Prominent geologist John Dewey summed up this sad state of affairs nicely, in an acceptance speech for a major award no less. Suffice to say that many undergraduates in such departments graduate with a high school level understanding of the earth. I wonder if poorly-trained geologists played a role in the Deepwater Horizon disaster?
I won't go into the reasons for this here (it deserves its own post), but many older, comfortable and tenured faculty in such departments care not a whit. In the departments that still cover the basics, many of the established petrologists, mineralogists, structural geologists etc. only pay lip service to addressing this problem. Even worse, they continue to recruit and graduate PhDs who have little chance of the job opportunities and security of the baby-boomers who came before. This seems to be occurring in many sciences. This labor market problem is a huge one, yet it is rarely acknowledged.

IMHO the reason is simple: many established faculty have theirs and crying for more money for grad students, while at the same time dumbing down and shrinking departments, makes their lives more comfortable. They're not getting monetarily wealthy, but gain in the riches faculty care about, i.e. department resources, perks, and status. The current system provides proteges to help them get their work done or a bigger chunk of the departmental resource pie, all with no sacrifice on the part of the established. Even with more money this will not change. Pulling up the ladder behind themselves is what many boomers do best.

Higher Education Woes Part I: More Funding Alone Won't Help

Colleges and universities in the U.S. have become less and less able to provide the courses and faculty expertise they have in the past, while at the same time tuition and fees have skyrocketed.  Over time, the quality of course content has declined as the pressure to enroll and graduate more students has increased. This problem poses a threat to rational research and problem-solving that will be need in the coming decades of change.
The blame for this is usually leveled at cuts in state budgets, but the problem exists in private institutions as well.The real culprit is the ever-growing, highly paid, non-educational administrative beast that must be fed by increased student payments (hence higher enrollment), less staff and less upper-level classes with small enrollments. Marketing is key in bringing in more money to feed the beast and eventually marketing becomes an end unto itself. College athletics is also part of this paradigm. All this was well-detailed by Bob Samuels in an April HuffPo piece that looked at the stressed UCal system. My favorite parts of his article:
"In 2008, there were 397 staff and administrators in the over 200k club making a collective total of $109 million, and in 2006, the same group had 214 members for a collective gross pay of $58.8 million."
and
"In other terms, the increased expense of administration not only takes money away from the instructional and research budgets, but it also gives power to people who have no connection to education." 
In short, the former supporting actors of educational institutions, administration and athletics, are now the prime reason for the existence of many colleges and universities. IMHO the problem is compounded by many self-righteous, tenured and ensconced baby-boomer faculty who are more concerned with their perks and retirement benefits than the future of their departments and the graduate students they keep running through the system.
Update: the Boston Globe had a piece today on the digs of college presidents at prestigious Boston area institutions and how the IRS is pushing to have them considered compensation. Now college president is a needed admin. position and one would expect that Harvard would put theirs up in one of the stately properties they own. But in any school, once you start adding more high-end administrators (usually to oversee some trivial matter that could be handled by existing mid-level offices) they require staff, swank offices, staff and housing.  You can see how the money will then flow away from education and research to support the compensation we are told such administrators require. Things do not have to be at the level of what is offered at MIT etc. for this to occur.