Right Wing Nation

 

I’m really sick of hearing academics whine about how unversities have no money. Really sick of it.

Let’s look at why they have no money. Root cause: university administrators don’t understand the basic concepts “cost” and “revenue” (which is unsurprising, since universities are run by liberals who can’t manage to program their VCRs or calculate a 15% tip, and believe that they are entitled to every penny of tax money they want).

But ignoring that fundamental reason, there are others — reasons that universities don’t have money, and reasons state legislatures should tell universities to go pound sand when they want more money. Let’s look at a few.

Utter lack of accountability

Only university staff and non-tenured (adjunct) faculty are accountable. Tenured faculty are in no way accountable, no matter how much of a mess they create. Not accountable to their peers, not accountable to the university administration, not accountable to the university trustees, not accountable to the state legislatures who give them more and more money, not accountable to the voting taxpayers who pay their salaries.

Here’s a scenario, one I’ve seen many times.

Professor Howling is selected by his peers as the new departmental chairman (or program director, or whatever). He is not selected because they feel he is capable of doing the job — his peers don’t care about that, because nobody is accountable. No, he’s selected because it’s “his turn” (note that the only way to sacrifice your “turn” is to piss everybody off and not play the academic politics game).

Professor Howling’s salary triples, because he is now the chairman. Being the ivory tower idiot that he is, he pays little attention to the department, particularly little attention to important things like how many grad students there are, whether they are graduating with PhDs, how many applicants, and what the department might do to attract more students (not to mention grants). As a result of his lofty inattention, the department goes to hell.

At the end of his term, he keeps his inflated salary — because he used to be the chairman! Never mind that he singlehandedly ruined the department — that’s one of those real world concerns, and here in the ivory tower, we pride ourselves on our utter lack of knowledge about and regard for real world concerns!

Had he been in the private sector, Howling would have been living in a cardboard box on the street — and should have been. But no, Howling keeps making $120K, despite the fact that he’s incompetent, despite the fact that he didn’t care enough about the trust he was given to take his mind off that pointless research he does long enough to do his job.

(The irony is that academics are forever whining about how universities are being run like businesses. No. The difference is accountability.)

Worthless research

Here’s another common one, particularly in the humanities, social sciences and education, where post-modernism rules. Taxpayers give thousands of dollars to Professor Squealing to find out how Georgina, her student, “feels” about herself in the classroom.

This, btw, is known as “qualitative research.” It is neither.

After giving Georgina numerous surveys to find out how she feels, and what would make her feel better, Professor Squealing concludes that competition, patriarchy, white heterosexual males who eat red meat, thinking about the exitence of white heterosexual males who eat read meat, Christianity, sexism, racism, speciesism, looksism, obeseism, whateverism keeps Georgina from feeling as good about herself as she might and she is therefore the victim of an oppressive, disempowering, disenfranchising meat-eating war-mongering corporate capitalist system (oops, sorry, forgot “marginalizing” there).

Of course you’re wondering why anyone should care how Georgina feels about herself in the classroom — any rational human being would wonder the same thing. And as Professor Squealing has not yet figured out, when Georgina gets out into the real world and gets a job, her employer won’t give two shits about how she feels. But that’s how low our universities have descended — the classroom as a group therapy session.

Useless bureaucracy

It should come as no surprise that universities are continually creating more and more wasteful middle management, given that universities are government institutions (and this even applies to private universities, who play follow the leader).

Let’s take Professor Howling (see above), our new departmental chairman. The largest source of revenue for his department is a mandatory undergraduate course which has been administered and taught — quite successfully — for well over a decade by non-tenured (adjunct) faculty.

Our idiot chairman decides that this is unacceptable, because peons can’t be trusted with course content or administration! His solution is to reorganize the adjuncts under a tenured “coordinator” so the course will have more prestige (only to tenured faculty).

The new coordinator is wholly, utterly unconcerned with the course or administering it, other than using his textbook (royalties) and the additional 60K he gets to “coordinate” it.

Guess how much the adjuncts who successfully administered the course got for the same thing. Go on, guess. That’s right. Zip.

Being uninterested in anything other than his pet research projects, he foists all the responsibilities he is being paid for off on the adjuncts, who out of resentment, stand back for the first time in the history of the course. The course goes to hell — but of course, the adjuncts are blamed.

Ivory tower attitude

You may think this has tenuous relevance to money, but you’d be wrong. Academics are like babies sucking at mommy’s tit. They do nothing but demand, demand, demand, more, more, more money from the legislatures. They never have enough money.

Business schools are the exception. Why? Well, they don’t depend on taxes. They solicit private funding.

Bingo! you say. Of course, because as we pointed out a few moments ago, you’re a rational human being.

Mention this suggestion to an academic and it’s like throwing holy water on a vampire. Evil! Awful! Polluting the purity of the ivory tower! Dreadful!

Idiots.

But this attitude affects costs and revenues in other ways. Professor Howling sees no reason to pay attention to such mundane things because of this attitude. Professor Squealing never wonders if her research could in any way be meaningful or productive because of this attitude.

These people need to be slapped and forced to deal with the real world. The best thing that could happen to American universities would be for legislatures to cut off every penny of funding, so they have to deal with reality and find ways to fund themeselves.