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Tuesday, November 5, 2013

Work for Hire v. Administration for Life


32 comments:

Anonymous said...

This $5000 for DL courses reminds me of the $5000 awards for Student Impact Awards, run just before the HLC visit. I believe the term for this is "bribery".

Anonymous said...

Why would anyone sell his or her materials for $5000? That's a pretty cheap price for one's intellectual property. It's a free country, but think before you sign.

Anonymous said...

Disrespect and disparage your own faculty for six years running and they will learn to disrespect themselves. Well done, Jacobs, Inc.

Anonymous said...

The elephant in the room is this: in a corporation, people give away their intellectual property as the result of being employed by the corporation.

To date most university professors have not been expected to turn over their intellectual property to the university in exchange for the compensation of employment. For better or for worse, this is changing. Universities are being expected by their fiscal supporters to become more like corporations in the way business is done.

I nor anyone else cay say where this is going, ultimately. Education is now being regarded as a service product that can be delivered as a product in the free market and should be expected to perform to the efficiencies of the free market. This is a basic change in philosophy where before education was regarded as a government service provided to its citizens free from market forces.

I do not see any trend to return to the government service philosophy. Therefore, I expect the university to become eventually an investor supported entity where the investor will expect dividends in return for their investments. This will drive yet more changes to remuneration for intellectual property, more changes to regard the faculty as salaried employees with a limited voice in management and more changes to insure that professors are turning a profit back to the university.

Anonymous said...

I will make a counter offer to them. I will lease them my intellectual property provided that I get per student royalties on the use of the intellectual property and I get an up front stipend. Further, my department will retain control over who teaches the class and when. I also get a right of first refusal to teach any class that uses this IP. I retain ownership of the intellectual property for purposes of publishing. Finally, the lease is severed and I retain full right to use the materials should I leave the university.

Anonymous said...

Sounds like the road to more sexual harassment and servility in public higher education to me:
“The elephant in the room is this: in a corporation, people risk giving away their bodies as the result of being employed by the corporation. To date most university professors have not been expected to turn over their bodies to the university in exchange for the compensation of employment. For better or for worse, this is changing. Universities are being expected by their fiscal supporters to become more like corporations in the way business is done" blah blah blah. Lawyerspeak. Let's keep the machine out of this garden.

Anonymous said...

There are several strategies to take:

1. Deny that the university is corporatizing
2. Ignore the corporatizing and hope it goes away
3. Fight the corporatizing
4. Accept the corporatizing as an inactive participant
5. Embrace the corporatizing as an active participant

#1 to my way of thinking is "sticking your head in the sand" and is no better than #2 in the outcomes.

#3 is a real choice but fraught with problems. In order to be effective, the proponents of this strategy need to build a consensus among the faculty. In addition they need to educate the voting population that the original philosophies supporting universities as a needed government service was correct and right.

#4 is not much better than #2 except that the proponents of this strategy are being realistic.

#5 at the current time is the safest strategy one could take and the one which will benefit the proponents of this strategy in the short term. In the long term? Maybe not... The corporation is a "dog eat dog" world where only the most efficient and the most capitalized survive.

Clearly, proponents of all five strategies exist within the faculty on campus. Furthermore, it does not seem to me that any proponents have been particularly effective within the faculty in executing their strategy. As a result, the non faculty administration has set the impetus for changing the university. This has not lead to more effective education and therefore, has not benefited either the public recipients of education or the university.

Iyam A. Robot said...

Perhaps concerned faculty bloggers in higher education institutions should hook up and associate to protect each others' backs? Meanwhile Friends of Bloggie can study this scenario playing out over at CSU and its contemplare and discuss its broader implications:

http://csufacultyvoice.blogspot.com/

Anonymous said...

What a novel concept. Universities hiring people who lack qualifications or experience for their job and instead give the position via "personal connections." I don't know where else this could apply.

There should be an audit of all faculty and staff c.v.'s, resumes, and personnel records at UT to ferret out any possible instances of cronyism or otherwise questionable hiring practices. Just leafing through faculty bio's, one finds more than a few individuals who were graduate students at UT (possible cronyism rather than competitive searches). Isn't hiring your own graduates incestuous and generally frowned upon by better universities? Maybe some of these are legacy hires from the old days of Bancroft High. Turning to staff and administrators, how many of those folks got their degrees at UT (more possible cronyism)? How many of them were hired without experience doing the job? How many current or former board members are directly or indirectly drawing from University funds or that of its "spinoffs"? How many administrators or staff have their jobs because of personal connections rather than qualifications? Further, how many faculty, staff, or administrators have spouses, partners, children or other kin on the university payroll? Inquiring minds want to know.

Of course, not all folks who were hired due to their connections or under-qualification are doing a bad job at UT. However, I think reforming hiring practices to require actual and open competitive searches rather than some of the more recent practices would be a useful reform. More openness to public scrutiny and greater public accountability for all university actors (faculty, staff, administrator and board) would be welcomed too.

Anonymous said...

Does anyone have details about the closing of the Apple Tree daycare? The Collegian article discussed some financial problems, but it was sketchy on the reason for the more-or-less immediate closure. I'm sure Scarborough's "reverse Midas touch" is a factor. Will Apple Tree be re-opening off campus?

Anonymous said...

Apple Tree will be gone, UT discussing with another child care provider to use that space, but with no financial support from UT (was $100,000 per year)

Anonymous said...

Are there any men in CLLSS?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qksWw7JT-Ew

Anonymous said...

Haven't seen "YOU College" discussed here. And this is completely hearsay, but what I've heard is it is a disaster. The admins in charge lumped all of the YOU College Freshmen into the same classes, and so they all reinforce each's negative behavior. Attendance is around 30% and less for all classes with the likely pass rate less than that. And in at least one class, the students were so unruly the lecturer teaching it had to go and tell whomever is in charge she could not teach the class effectively with so many disruptive students: the admin response? to send in a "monitor" who escorts unruly students out of the class for a time-out. Turns out the admin master plan is to turn UT into a bad High School.

Anonymous said...

So much for the "cohort" model. It's fine if you've got well-prepared students, but a group of under-prepared students just holds each other back. But, hey, by this time of the semester, the students' checks have cleared and that's all that Jacobs and company care about.

Anonymous said...

Novel idea: Follow the Georgia model of higher education reform- consolidation. Make the University of Toledo and Bowling Green branch campuses of Ohio State. Stop wasting taxpayer money on public universities trying to out compete each other for students.

Anonymous said...

your description of the current classes in YouCollege is very correct, plus I heard UT recruited the fall 2014 class for YouCollege from the same high school - all friends and the same lazy disruptive students that were together in high school

mary ellen edwards said...

I watched the CLLSS video. The pictures of Toledo Hospital were "interesting"

Anonymous said...

http://www.forbes.com/sites/robasghar/2013/11/15/the-toughest-leadership-job-of-all-its-not-what-you-think/

It's a neat little article about how being president of a university is actually kind of hard. Some battlefield surgeon hired without a national search may turn out not to be very good at it.

Anonymous said...

http://business.time.com/2013/11/10/the-real-reason-new-college-grads-cant-get-hired/?xid=newsletter-weekly

Anonymous said...

After reading the latest article mentioned here, I wonder how DL students are going to manage the "show up on time" or even the "show up" part of their first job.I'm not referring to DL students who are working full-time and raising a family. I'm talking about the students who live on campus and take DL because they just can't be bothered to come to class.

Anonymous said...

Yesterday's headline from the IC:

SMOKING BAN RESURRECTED STUDENT GOVERNMENT PRESIDENT, VICE PRESIDENT TO PUSH FORWARD BAN WITHOUT SENATE APPROVAL.

Sound familiar? Jacobs Inc. will have its way and to hell with democracy. Aping our top administrators at UT, student government leaders are easily manipulated by the prevailing new business model for higher education to trample venerable campus democratic institutions to implement their policies. BULLY bully.Stop Mini-me-ism!

Anonymous said...

I was excited to read that Gold is a finalist for a position at the University of Nebraska. Now that cuts to our academic offerings and other areas have been exhausted, it's time for UT to start looking at its administration. With the new economic reality, we can no longer afford to do business as usual. I think it's time to impose new workload rules on senior leadership. As Provost, Scarborough should be able to effectively butcher and demoralize two campuses for the price of one. This workload we are talking about is not out of line. The bottom line is you just don't have a lot of good options when the university doesn't have a lot of extra cash lying around.

Anonymous said...

Regarding the "YOU College" tread. The majority of UT students need smaller classes and more individualized instruction to succeed, not just the YOU College students. Demographically, most of UT's students come from less than ideal HS backgrounds, as far as preparation for academia is concerned. Under the current deteriorating conditions, the only way most can succeed is by lowering already low standards (which is exactly what is happening as the faculty adjusts to increase class size and workload). Once upon a time, a UT PR campaign proudly announced to the public its professor/student ratio and boasted of the individualized instruction students would receive. If anyone remembers the "throwing under the bus thread"? well, that's what the current UT admins and that's what the commercialization of 2nd and 3rd tier universities is doing: throwing middle and lower class students under the bus. The premise of Jacobs and his kind is that the students UT attracts don't need the best instruction or the best learning environments because as students they are not the best. At best, Jacobs and his ilk think UT's students will be no more than corporate drones. The movement afoot is to turn large numbers of US universities into educational factories for the masses, operated by an elite administrative caste.

Anonymous said...

If Gold doesn't get the job the mere fact that he was a finalist for the U Nebraska job will mean that all the upper level admins at UT will give themselves raises and faculty whiners will never hear the end of it: 'well prof whiner, if UT is so poorly run why, tell me why, was Gold a FINALIST????' And of course if he does get the job his portrait will be hung from the bell tower with the inscription: "The few, the proud: YOUR ADMINISTRATORS"

Anonymous said...

Gold is leaving, Provost is interviewing, and apparently Jacobs is getting (and making) calls, perhaps times are changing?

Anonymous said...

I thought llss video was kind of weird and spooky.

Anonymous said...

Re: calls elsewhere for Gold and Jacobs to move to:
calls for what? a decline in enrollment? a decline in morale? A decrease in revenue? A prioritization process which is misguided and top down?
of course the hiring officials are the equivalent of BOT members. and whoever asks tough questions on final interviews? Ans: No-One. The easiest administrator to sell to someone else is the value system that the buying agent reflects. Now UT faculty, staff and BOT need to answer for themselves: Have student interests been served by this administration? If not, fire them and hire folks who are smart and pragmatic - not smart and self-obsessed. Remember the phrase: Jacobs has never met an idea that he could not improve upon?....take it to heart.

Anonymous said...

Can someone explain why the UT Foundation's annual report (released today) shows a decline in donations of $1.8 million from 2012 and why this is the second straight decrease? This decline occurred as the economy has relatively strengthened (compared to where it was in 2009) and stocks are at a record high (making financially viable to gift securities).

Anonymous said...

One of the idiot administrators has left! Gold is moving to Nebraska!
Look here:
http://utnews.utoledo.edu/index.php/11_27_2013/ut-leader-accepts-job-at-university-of-nebraska?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=ut-leader-accepts-job-at-university-of-nebraska

I am sure Jacobs will place one of his other minions there... forget about Scary taking up both jobs (unless they are going to pay him 3 million $ a month obviously...).

Anonymous said...

one down, two more to go????

Anonymous said...

With his experience with UTMC very likely SS takes over both provost positions, chance for LJ to justify increasing SS pay to keep him from also leaving (is interviewing), but with G leaving LJ can still point to net $ savings. Very unlikely for any major search or UT appointment, only SS makes sense here.

Anonymous said...

Having Gold as chancellor and executive vice president for biosciences and health affairs, and dean of the College of Medicine and Life Sciences, was only to satisfy his ego and meet his huge salary demands, with him gone there is no need for such a position (Health Campus Provost) or a chancellor. They will give Scary both provost jobs and dig up a UTMC suck up to be Medical Dean