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Wednesday, January 18, 2012

Posters

Just a couple of quick notes. First, read the article below. However, when you do make certain you are not close enough to strike the family cat. It will anger you as it did me. It will verify what most of us who have been in higher education for a while have known but not had the facts to state. Administrations and staffs at universities have grown at an enormous rate. Please read it.

Second, you may have noticed the posters around campus explaining to students that the Higher Learning Commission is coming to town. Since the HLC may stop and talk to students, the University wishes them to be informed. There is a web site students can go to in order to read all of the fun reports. I have a much simpler road for students to take:

1. If asked questions, be friendly
2. If asked questions, be honest
3. If all this fails, throw your arms in the air and run away yelling, "its all Tucker's fault."

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Aww, I wouldn't hit my cat. But I might run a bow tie through the food processor. That article's list of administrative improprieties reads like a how-to manual for the Jacobs gang.

Anonymous said...

Ginsberg has hit the nail on the head. Someone should call him and invite him to UT to do research for his next book on administrative bloat and waste.

Anonymous said...

About the post "Big Appetites", I have found this other post online (source: http://iranianredneck.wordpress.com/2011/07/21/deanlets-deanlings-and-the-decline-of-higher-education/)

I rarely get excited about the release of a new book, but Benjamin Ginsberg had me doing a pre-order on Amazon as soon as I caught whiff of the previews. Ginsberg takes on the principal problem in American higher education, the excessive growth of meaningless and harmful administration. Bogus fads like “assessment” and “strategic planning” and “on line “education”" and such require an ever increasing phalanx of deanlets to “manage” the resources necessary to deliver these bullshit products. And, I have a feeling that Ginsberg isn’t going to hold his punches regarding the motivations of the people who fuel bureaucratic growth. At the top, he clearly points the finger at careerist top administrators who move from place to place, justifying doing nothing by making worthless plans (often plagiarized from other universities or simply rehashed–because bullshit is bullshit is bullshit!!!). Vision statement. Yeah. Right. Strategic Plan? Are there any other kinds of plans? Random plans? In reality, all actual administration is more random planning!!! You plan to use your resources according to how those resources have been randomly allocated to your department by some careerist asshole!

My hope is that Ginsberg doesn’t stop at the top–those high paid presidents and deans who move from place to place doing nothing and bailing out before they can be held accountable for fucking things up. Those people came from somewhere. They started out as deanlets and deanlings (he uses these terms! I should have copyrighted them!). Failed scholars who barely made tenure (or didn’t make tenure, in many cases) and moved into administration. Leeching on to some academic fad which they hope to ride into a cushy, highly compensated administrative job. We have several of those assholes who are successfully becoming deanlets at my humble university. They are the most loathesome pieces of shit you can possibly imagine. But, since the upper administration has been a revolving door (we’ve had four chancellors in the ten years I’ve been here), they’ve been able to implant themselves like tapeworms in the bowels of the University. And what do these tapeworms do? They require that we reconstruct our courses, force students to take bullshit courses which they designed (often taking kickbacks from publishers and consultants who also feed this parasitic infection in higher education), and they increase our workload by making people perform bullshit psychometric “assessment” which they don’t even understand. Some failed humanities professor who never had a single course in statistics or measurement actually had the audacity to tell me that I was a bad teacher because I refused to play along with the “no child left behind” model of academic assessment. My only hope is that they’ll be hired away to become Associate Deans at some other college…..and not replaced.

Anonymous said...

People might want to read (and comment) on this article in the Blade about the BOT's concerns with respect to the retention problem: http://www.toledoblade.com/Education/2012/01/24/UT-board-eyes-ways-to-change-enrollment.html

Anonymous said...

Has anyone else noticed that UT seems to be in some sort of agreement to display commercial pop up advertisements from its webiste? Whenever I access UT pages I also frequently get a pop up window with an advertisement.

Here is one that popped up when I brought up the UT home page:

http://www.educationconnection.com/programs/?CID=eddyecsdisplayfads_university

Anonymous said...

If you're interesting in spin, compare and contrast these two articles: the first from the Blade (http://www.toledoblade.com/Education/2012/01/25/Area-colleges-universities-post-drops-in-enrollment.html) about enrollment dips at UT; the second from UTNews (http://utnews.utoledo.edu/index.php/01_25_2012/ut-sees-jump-in-international-transfer-student-populations)about the "jump" in enrollment, including, wait for it, an extra 29 international students! Your head may or may not be spinning yet, but Larry Burns is spinning like a top.

Anonymous said...

"BOT's concerns with respect to the retention problem"

Retention problem, my foot! That's just a case of :"The Blade" (getting quite dull, though) trying to save face by printing crap like this...

BOT members are getting way too much to be concerned about a "slight" drop (which is only relative), which is nothing in comparison to what each of them gets out of having Jacobs, Inc. around. This is good business, so worry not: BOT members will keep Jacobs and Gang around and -- they hope -- the University Senate in hopes to getting more out it. A great case of puppet government. We just need to figure out who the puppeteer is...