Higher education is not undergoing something like the financial reengineering craze that was so popular and so destructive in corporate America more than a decade ago -- cutting back on the workers and loading university presidents of million dollar salaries and perqs.
Here is the New York Times take on the lavish housing expenditures for Mark Yudof, president of the University of California. Everyone else is expected to willingly accept the necessary sacrifices for the good of the organization. The article begins with a "midnight move ... the latest chapter in a two-year housing drama that has cost the university more than $600,000 and has drawn senior U.C. officials into an increasingly time-consuming and acrimonious ordeal over the president’s private residence."
Fainaru, Steve. 2010. "University Head’s Housing Raises Ire." New York Times (21 August): p. A 23A.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/education/22bcyudof.html?_r=2&ref=us&pagewanted=all
Ummm...
ReplyDeleteWell, this story kind of takes care of the solution of locking up the Wall Street traders, the politicos, and any other category of "bad guy" who we have it in for, doesn't it ?...
A decadent society is decadent all the way through, not in isolated bits and pieces.
That reminds me that discounting September 11, 2001, the U.S. has not had a major war on its soil since the 1860's.
Every disadvantage has its advantage too.
Sometimes when the rot goes all the way through, a quick brushfire clears things out to build anew.
Ask the Sequoias. It's how they reproduce...
This is the kind of thing Paul Goodman wrote about in People or Personnel: the high-overhead style of the large, hierarchical organization (in contrast to the small, ad hoc, self-managed organization).
ReplyDeleteExpensive real estate, custom-designed buildings, prestige salaried resume carpetbaggers, Weberian work rules and "best practices," mission statements, and all the rest of it.... When you do away with all that crap and start a university from zero base (a scholars' co-op on the Bologna model renting cheap classroom space and hiring instructors), the per student cost is a tiny fraction that of a conventional university. Same with every other area of life. High overhead, unnecessary capital outlays, rents on artificial property rights, subsidized waste, and so forth, play the same role in our economy that retained fluid does in a human body bloated by edema. It's like a Rube Goldberg machine, where half the jobs are the moral equivalent of digging holes and filling them back in.
"now" for "not"?
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