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Thursday, February 25, 2010

Provost Powerpoint Plan


Above is one of the Powerpoint slides that Provost Haggett presented to the Academic and Student Affairs committee of the BOT on Feb 15.  Note that (1) the plan is obviously to dismember the College and its academic integrity/autonomy as guaranteed by department structures and disciplines, and (2) and, apparently, to entirely bypass the current CAS Dean in this process. Copies of the entire presentation will be sent around by various folks in the College. Or, if you email ASCBloggie.com, then Bloggie will send you the complete Powerpoint presentation so that you can see for yourself what our corporate masters are planning for our students and us and the College. This revered institution will apparently die, a death administered by medical prescription, in its hundredth year. The Provost also seems to think a great deal of the Arizona State University structure, so beware its mindless application. 

Will Dr. Jacobs be signing the death certificate for the College of Arts and Sciences? 

7 comments:

Professor Demeritus said...

Do the "professional preparation units" include Preparation-H?

Anonymous said...

aFrom what I see and hear, UT administrators are becoming more and more prone to duplicity , deception and secretiveness. They vary their messages to their audiences; dodge questions; obfuscate and hide. Giving a straight answer seems beyond their natures,

Anonymous said...

“Regents of the University of Arizona will vote in March on a 31 percent increase that would boost tuition by $2,130 to $8,972. For future students at Arizona State University, a 19 percent increase of $1,286 for total tuition of $8,126 is proposed.”

http://caivn.org/article/2010/02/25/california-not-alone-passing-budget-pain-public-university-students

I’ve followed the ASU public university “transformation” for several years. Like here, it amounts mainly to an ideological restructuring of public higher education learning spaces that seeks to provide no safe and significant free-speech zone for tenured professors with liberal ideals in undergraduate classrooms.

What seems so pernicious about eliminating A&S College’s traditional free-standing disciplines and departments and calling it “progress” and "student-centered" is that the continued enrichment and empowerment of the Jacobs managerial technocracy will be financed down the line with massive tuition hikes imposed on the student body and implementated over the dead body of our tenured professoriate.

Anonymous said...

Isn't bypassing the dean good?

The Isle of Pines said...

Wait a second... didn't Henry Ford combat this backward notion a hundred years ago? Are we forgetting they very progress we have made as a species?

The only way to increase efficiency, and therefore production, is to increase specialization in the system itself. Hence, autos for the masses are produced on an assembly line instead of being handbuilt for those who order them on a case by case basis -- otherwise, they would be prohibitively expensive for the common man.

Perhaps when you are an administrator that can afford a handbuilt Maybach or Rolls-Royce, both autos or education for the masses are of little concern...

Anonymous said...

Re bypassing dean, I think in this sense it refers to the fact that this is a top down effort, while the Dean either, Does not know what is going on (likely) or is complicit in a befuddled way. Don't forget that sehe want to change the "organizational culture" around here, even though she appears to have no idea what it is that faculty actually do in the College.

Anonymous said...

Gee What A Surprise....
...to see administrators wanting to take away yet more opportunities for college students.

I tell you what is really "unsustainable": college administration.

These leeches suck dry the tax payers (at public universities) and the alumni (and both public and private institution) with their high salaries, misplaced priorities (how many new buildings did you put up this decade? How many academic programs did you cut? How many tenured positions did you slash in favor of adjuncts?), and rampant cronyism.

Oh sure, it is easy to scapegoat the handful of high salaried coaches at the small minority of universities that feature big time revenue sports, but the reality is athletics in under seige at all levels of competition, especially at smaller institutions who are often not paying their coaches what an adjunct prof makes.

It is such a scam, and a self perpetuating one to boot. First you have the careerist administrator wannabe, who knows the best way to parlay up from Podunk U. to a bigger and better institution is to divert resources away from unsexy things (like education) in favor of the splashy, be it an unneeded new building or some "international initiative" that will require some "working" trips to Europe or Asia to "sort things out". And what happens if resistence is met to these efforts? Well, here comes an "accrediting" agency (also made up of administrative types - what are the chances?) who declares the university simply cannot go on without an expensive new building....which is what they wanted for the resume anyway.

The people never thought of through this whole process are the students whose experience becomes ever shallower because there is simply less substance for them to engage with, be it academics, arts or athletics.