I have a couple seemingly unrelated pieces of information that I thought folks might like to know about. First, the Independent Collegian is moving back on campus with an advisor. He will apparently report to Tobin Klinger. It will now change its name to the Dependent Collegian. My how short some memories are.
Second the Board of Trustees, that group of happy campers, has amended its by-laws so that Board Members are not allowed to disagree in public with announced Board Policy. As I always say let by-laws be by-laws.
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Hard Eight: Auto-Ethnographic Essays on Academic Culture Featuring the End of the Arts & Sciences College, University of Toledo, 2010
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Do you agree or disagree that University of Toledo suffers from administrative bloat?
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COMMENT OF THE WEEK
Bloggie applauds this perspicacious observer:
"The administration is in a panic mode to implement controversial and irreversible structural and curricular changes campus-wide by early February fiscal plan deadlines with only the vaguest notions of their impacts. The plan is, according to an interview with a top administrator published in the most recent Independent Collegian, to cast out many seeds and "see what grows." This experimental garden, as most senators articulated in many different ways, seems a costly recipe for disaster. Utter madness. Stay tuned."
Print Version of Dictionary of Academia Available on Amazon.com
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Comment of the Week
"This is that old tension between the corporate way of doing things and the academic way of doing things. In the corporate world, you sweep everything under the rug to make your b.s. as shiny, pleasing to the nose, and profitable as possible. In the academic world, you operate with a higher moral standard. Veritas and all that."
Comment of the Week of August 13
Re UT academic posers and hypocrites:
Have their checks calculated in units of postmodern theoretical currency and issued in photocopied legal tender notes signed by Walter Benjamin with a photo of Karl Marx and a seal stamped “In Derrida We Trust”.
Comment of the Era
Wow! Ain't that something.
-Anonymous
Comment of the Week
Mention goes to the the anonymous commentator of Feb 7, who, regarding UT President Llloyd Jacob's "Investing in Faculty" letter, stated: "If we could use the same criteria for 'investing in administrators' we could cut most of those positions."
Comments to HLC
Make sure you address your comments to HLC to the email address listed below in the "Higher Learning Commission Wants to Know" post. This may be the only chance you have to be heard. Bloggie hears that UT administration has discussed giving faculty "training" so that faculty members know how to "properly" talk to the HLC folks. How's that for stacking the deck? Does everyone get a little script to read? Make sure you practice before a mirror at being bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.
Comment of the Week!
Definitely, the Comment of the Week award goes to Anonymous 12:14 pm, Dec 3, under the "Higher Learning Commission Needs to Know" posting by Diogenes. Pithy and pointed!
--Love,
Bloggie
MESSAGE OF THE DAY:
DON'T BE A SHEEP
Independent Collegian Article on Dicey Administrative Spending
IC reporter Casey Cheap looks at bow ties, apartments and movie tickets purchased by UT administrators at university/public expense. See
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Letter and Petition from Foreign Languages Faculty Member
A couple weeks ago, at the beginning of summer break, we in the Department of Foreign Languages were informed that our secretary's position was being eliminated and that while she will not lose her job (she'll be transferred), that position is not to be filled. We apparently will be expected to do our own jobs plus what we can of the secretary's. That is clearly not acceptable, and so one of the steps we in FL are taking against it is an online petition now available for any who want to (including those who for whatever reason--not a registered Ohio voter, not a US citizen, etc.--cannot sign the petition against SB5), to read and sign.
I know not everyone on the blog will be interested in this; I'm not asking anyone who doesn't want to, to sign or even read the petition. I do think that there are many who would be interested and would want to sign it--if they knew about it.
It's scary to post this under my own name; I'm as afraid as anyone of repercussions. But this is simply too important to keep quiet on, and we have to do something! FL is not the first department that this has happened to, and it's almost certain not to be the last if we don't speak up in a way that the administration will hear us and in a way that makes clear that other people are seeing that it's going on.
Here's the link to the online petition:For those who can make it, there will also be an informational meeting--including lunch and petition-signing--next Friday, May 27 in FH 2420, 12:00 - 2:00 p.m.
I know not everyone on the blog will be interested in this; I'm not asking anyone who doesn't want to, to sign or even read the petition. I do think that there are many who would be interested and would want to sign it--if they knew about it.
It's scary to post this under my own name; I'm as afraid as anyone of repercussions. But this is simply too important to keep quiet on, and we have to do something! FL is not the first department that this has happened to, and it's almost certain not to be the last if we don't speak up in a way that the administration will hear us and in a way that makes clear that other people are seeing that it's going on.
Here's the link to the online petition:For those who can make it, there will also be an informational meeting--including lunch and petition-signing--next Friday, May 27 in FH 2420, 12:00 - 2:00 p.m.
Katherine Best
Wave of the Future or Merely Sometime Later This Week?
The Chronicle of Higher Education ran a deeply fascinating article called, "When to Dissolve a Faculty Senate." Apparently this is any time that it becomes "adversarial" to administration.
The online comments to the article are priceless.
Nemeth on Mammon in IC
David Nemeth's most recent tour-de-force
Professor Nemeth has another fabulous and timely article in the new and increasingly wonderful Independent Collegian. See http://www.independentcollegian.com/forum/the-kraken-attacks-1.2340091
Nemeth Does it Again
See the forum article in The Independent Collegian at:
Nemeth's New Article in Collegian
The Independent Collegian has run another of Professor Nemeth's fine and provocative articles in its latest edition. This one discusses the double-talk by mouthpieces for the current UT administration concerning the effects of and reasons behind so-called strategic reorganization. Make sure you get the latest version of Newspeak 5.1 if you want to decode what UT administrators are really saying.
UT Ranks 13th Nationally on Administrative Bloat
See Appendix B of the Administrative Bloat report posted on 8/28 for evidence, but UT now has a higher proportion of administrators to students than all but 12 public universities in America. President Jacobs has finally put University of Toledo in the top tier. With Strategic Organization he may be aiming for number one.
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Recent Letters from The Blade
Jacobs' arrogance is astonishing
Recently, President Lloyd Jacobs of the University of Toledo stated that bonuses were justified because his administrators "took all the risks."
As a professor at UT, I am outraged that President Jacobs claims that administrators take all of the risks. What risks do they take that the other faculty and staffs on campus do not?
Administrators are protected by state and federal employment laws and by their contracts.
When ex-President Vik Kapoor was terminated, he remained a professor with a salary near what he was paid as president.
As president emeritus, Dan Johnson retained a salary greater than his pay as president.
In the recent layoffs, exceptionally few administrators were terminated. It seems to me that low-level personnel at UT have far more risks because the greater proportion of the layoffs have come from their ranks. And they did not have continuing salaries.
President Jacobs' answer to questions on two occasions regarding relinquishing part of his bonus was to the effect that he earned his bonuses and what he did with them was his business.
Administrators do not risk their personal money in their duties: they use taxpayer money and funds collected through donations and grants to the university.
Administrators take home salaries in the hundreds of thousands of dollars and then add bonuses for longevity and whatever else the president decides is fitting for their contracts.
However, the lower-level personnel have much lower salaries and no such bonuses. Where is the risk?
It seems to me that these bonuses are convoluted: The lower-level personnel are taking the greater risks with no bonuses while the administrators with very rewarding jobs with little risk receive large bonuses.
Am I missing something here?
WALTER W. OLSON,
Mechanical, Industrial, and Manufacturing
Engineering,
University of Toledo
It's the same old, same old at UT
I could hardly believe the arrogance of Dr. Lloyd Jacobs, president of the University of Toledo, when a reporter asked if he would be willing to forgo his bonus in light of the layoffs, raise in tuition, etc.
His comment was that he worked for it. Is that to say that the ones being laid off did not work for their pay?
All I can say is, business as usual at UT. Some things never change.
SANDY FLICK
Rose Acres Drive
UT also has checks, balances
In response to letter titled "Professors must focus on teaching," I would like to point out that the University of Toledo operates on the basis of shared governance.
This means that faculty members participate in the administration of the university.
A focus on teaching requires faculty to address administrative issues such as policies, procedures, and yes, finances, because these all affect classroom outcomes. A university with solid and equitable finances benefits everyone, including and especially the students. Just as the U.S. government is constituted to have checks and balances, so is our university government.
The UT-AAUP is one of those checks against UT administrators who most recently have displayed more concern for their own profit rather than a concern for the common good.
LINDA M. ROUILLARD,
Associate Professor
of French,
University of Toledo
Quote of the Year (so far)
The following is excerpted from the recent UT AAUP newsletter concerning the official university response to news of the bonus scandal:
. . . . Either Jacobs is misleading the media or he has misled the Board of Trustees. President Jacobs objected to "the general tone" of the UT-AAUP Newsletter. Many persons on this campus object to the "general tone" of the Jacobs Administration. During his tenure as President, he has introduced an administrative culture of fear and intimidation. . . . A point of logic must be raised here, with all respect to UT AAUP, the conclusions that President Jacobs has (1) misled the media and (2) the Board of Trustees are not mutually exclusive. Both would seem likely given his considerable talent at spinning "visions." |
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15 comments:
Hi Dr. Tucker,
I'm disappointed you didn't work to find out more of the facts on this before posting.
The new advisor is named Erik Gable, special projects editor for the Adrian Telegram. He reports to the Independent Collegian Media Foundation, a separate 501(c)(3) organization with its own board. He will have no reporting relationship to anyone in the Univ. Communications office.
The relationship between the UT/the University Communications Office and the IC is the same as it is between UT and other independent news organizations in town.
The implication that moving on campus will automatically cause IC editors and reporters to lose their ability to think critically and print the news as they see fit seems to me an unwarranted slight against their abilities.
The fact that they have an independent newspaperman serving as an advisor strikes me as a very positive step for them and a way for them to get professional advice on how an independent newspaper operates.
I hope you'll consider positing this comment.
For those who may not know, I serve as media relations manager for UT and, full disclose, I had Dr. Tucker as a professor for three different classes in college and had a great deal of respect for him. I enjoyed his sense of humor and his cat stories.
Free Speech?? What are you talking about? It seems to me like they are paying pretty good money for it. With speech, you only get what you pay for.
Independent Council on Foreign Relations report warns US educational failures pose national security threat
Lack of adequate STEM education a key component in educational failure
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/04/12/report-warns-us-educational-failures-pose-national-security-threat/?test=latestnews#ixzz1rv58tueO
Does anyone know where the "facts" are at the University of Toledo? It seems to me that our administrators have taken particular care to make the "facts," as they are traditionally known, unobtainable.
For example, there are no more "Blue Books" printed for the public and not so public. Special purpose fees now get hidden in the General Fund. The University owns a company in the Cayman Islands to hold funds for the Docs. The voices of faculty have been stamped on. People have been intimidated by the actions against those who dare to speak out.
Pray tell, where are these "facts" kept so that we can find them out?
This BOT will soon be internally divided and will hopefully implode, causing the same in UT's high ranks.
Blue Book? Since Jacobs Inc has hijacked this university -- turning it into a private/for-profit pseudo-academic enterprise (you may learn just as much by reading Reader's Digest in Dr. Gold's lobby incidentally also called the UTMC) -- at tax-payers cost-- there is no need to go public.
No Lemon Law will apply to UT until this administration and its friends among deans, faculty, media, and other scab will line up to support this madness. They do not realize they are digging their own graves (and for others) on the long run.
You can have all the science, medical, engineering you want -- I am not talking down on these -- but when you undercut or destroy the Humanities, you take the creative/intellectual component out. We might as well rename UT, the Boor-Land College, because it will only produce boorish graduates if this continues. You have been warned!
"Board Members are not allowed to disagree in public with announced Board Policy." // This sounds like the action of an organization with serious doubts about its own credibility. I'm glad the board is starting to grasp what everyone else in town has known since 2006.
Does the Board have any credibility to start with? So, they need not to doubt what they ain't got, because they will get no respect till they divorce themselves from Jacobs, Inc.
They may regain some of that by splitting MCO from UT and restore a semblance of what this university was...with a respectable library (lose COIL!)
The Board doesn't merger and split UT and MCO. That was an act by the Ohio legislature and even the most liberal Dems down there would never do that. Merging campuses is an efficiency talking point for everyone.
Please show me the "efficiency" that we gained by merging the universities. It seems that MUO has gained a larger budget based on what they can pull out of UT. Meanwhile UT has a "20 million dollar shortfall" despite revenue increases. And yet we don't even have enough people to get a simple action like preparing W-2's correctly!
While the average American gets hammered from all sides with unemployment and unrelenting economic hardship, public sector hot-shots on the dole (i.e. living on the taxpayers' dime) continue to party like it's 1999:
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/04/18/help-foxnewscom-fight-federal-waste/
Re ‘Boorish’ Anonymous April 14, 2012 6:59 AM
…Then again, given the “ascent” from the gutter into the mainstream rationalizing and enabling postmodern academy, of the degenerate “bohemian” lives “art” and ideology (i.e. ugly, toxic, incoherent, sex, drugs, booze, rock and roll, revolution, narcissism, mental illness, suicide, psycho-babble and pseudo-intellectual raving and propaganda) – from the likes of Marx, Rimbaud, Picasso, Joyce, Woolf, Henry Miller, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Hunter Thompson, Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol and Michel Foucault to Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin and countless jazz, rock, blues and hip-hop artists, to Richard Pryor, John Belushi, Chris Farley and countless comedians, to countless artists, writers, journalists, musicians, movie stars and media personalities to Madonna, Kurt Cobain, Courtney Love, Kanye West, Bobbie Brown, Whitney Houston, Robert Downey Jr., Amy Winehouse, Lindsay Lohan and Demi Moore, etc. etc. – the demise of contemporary liberal arts academic, artworld and pop-cultural boorishness and degeneracy-worship might actually result in a return to some civility, common decency, social values, high-mindedness and real art, culture and higher education for a change.
Re: Anonymous of April 18, 2012 1:13 PM
I must agree. There is a cyclic or pendulum-like movement between the two extremes. There is a lot more to humanities than the names you listed -- courtesy of a media further propagating the boorish side of popular culture through some celebrities and the likes. Not everything is trashy in postmodernism and poplar culture, except when we get too much Jerry Springer and the likes.
The only way the pendulum gets to swing in the right direction if it is given a chance by the educational system.
Jacobs, Inc. & Co (of cronies) need to understand that the arts and humanities are taught for the values and aesthetics and not the profits that the business, medical, engineering, and science programs are expected to generate.
Singed: the "boorish" anonymous
Anonymous 6:36: The merger does not need to have *actually* increased efficiency; it is enough for proponents merely to claim that it did. Remember, we are adopting practices from corporate America, and accepting whatever makes you feel good without evidence is Corporate Practice #1.
Re boorish anon 2
Glad you agree. There is FAR too much emphasis on the modernist and postmodernist degenerates of art, literature, culture and pop culture - and in academia of all places - to the point where young people are too often led to infer that the way to creative genius (or at least an appearance on Oprah) is through extreme, irresponsible self-destructive behaviors, drugs and the bottom of a booze bottle i.e. if I want to be the next Van Gogh or Hemingway – it’s booze, drugs, insanity and suicide all the way, baby.
If ever their was a time that we did not need the arts to be cynical and degenerate and self-absorbed and preoccupied with political correctness and telling us all that we are crap and life is crap and there is darkness in the human condition – it’s now.
Jane Austen, George Eliot and the Brontes get their due in the current canon and rightly so (perhaps more than their due if for no other reason than that they’re girls) along with a few others, but many Victorian and Edwardian novelists for instance have been widely and very wrongly dismissed as bourgeois – in favor of the self-indulgent and/or dark and degenerate drivel of everyone from Gertrude Stein, Henry Miller (who, full disclosure, I did read and enjoy during my ill-spent youth) and Eugene O’Neill to Hunter Thompson & Co. etc.
And this is no Victorian prude speaking here – I can actually “get” even the likes of Palahniuk’s Fight Club or McCarthy’s Blood Meridian or Ellis’s American Psycho.
But for truly masterly writing, the sort that lingers on your palette like fine wine, you absolutely cannot beat the likes of Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, Henry James, T. S. Eliot, Kipling, P. G. Wodehouse, Evelyn Waugh, Robert Graves, Lawrence Durrell, Somerset Maugham, E. M Forrester, Edith Wharton etc. – people who in turn took their cues from earlier masters of the language – Gibbon et al.
The Great Books and Western Canon of Mortimer Adler, Harold Bloom, the U of Chicago and Honors Programs are the only hope.
Anyway – who knows if people will even still be reading the written word 50 years from now – let alone reading good literature or appreciating great paintings or classical music.
Hey Anon. posting on April 20, 2012 12:59 PM (boorish anon 2.)
Perhaps the greatest assault on true narratives after Cliff Notes is the Web. Not only has it caused the average attention span (when it comes to deep reading) among today's youth to decline -- hats off to any exception; there are those who truly belong to serious academic work -- but it has lead to the deterioration of writing as well. Mass media will give you what you need to know, so you do not need to go to libraries (for purposes other than facebook and more texting -- and UT libraries are headed that way -- only one more floor of books to go...)
Here is twitter -- if you need more than 140 characters to get someone's attention you do not belong there. So, you start using texting shorthand (OMG, LOL, etc.) to the point that it becomes the standard, and some instructors may even embrace that.
Off those you listed, I really like P. G. Wodehouse, but Dickens, Austen, and others (Dostoyevsky) are worth reading. I agree with your concern that in 50 years, the narrative will be extinct either in the hands of popular culture or the PC police. We will see Cliff Notes Masterworks, narratives with 80% of text redacted by the PC police, and course texts 140 or fewer characters in length may emerge as standard. Who needs textbooks???
If the anti-Humanities assault by Jacobs, Inc and Co (of cronies) continues, UT will become TU - Twitter University...
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