mortiz055

I've been buried in final book manuscript revisions, and have been noticing that I'm increasingly using the term "management" rather than "administration" in my analyses of university governance.  Part of the reason is that my employer, the University of California, uses Senior Management Group as a formal employment classification.  But it's also because the friendlier aspects of the term "administration" seem decreasingly part of everyday academic life.   Friendliness was administration as support structure , as collaborator, as partner, as the entity that did not take orders from obnoxious egocentric faculty prima donnas the way that frontline staff often had to do, but that accepted balanced power relations  and a certain mutual respect that could make decisions move relatively quickly and equitably.  It would avoid command and control of the kind that prevailed in the army and in most corporations, where executive authority consisted of di...

The big story in Higher Education this year has been the threat of massive budget cuts.  From Wisconsin to Louisiana, from Kansas to Arizona, and from Maine to North Carolina, state governors and legislators have proposed or enacted cuts to public colleges and universities. Although the outcome of this year's budget struggles remain uncertain, it does seem clear that California is not going to impose new cuts. Instead we seem to be battling over the size of small state funding increases. That contrast between California and other states might appear to be grounds for confidence in the future.  But that would be premature.  Although the state has increased funding over the last several years and is proposing a small increment this year--it is important to recognize not only that these increases do not compensate for the years of cutbacks but that they help to solidify a strategy of permanent austerity budgeting. One way to see this point is to look at the recent Legislativ...

Last week's prize for most offensive higher ed article went to a University of Colorado law professor named Paul F. Campos, who had a New York Times Sunday Review tell-all about college costs.   The Real Reason College Tuition Costs So Much " turned out to be "not because states have cut funding for higher education." Prof. Campos came to this conclusion by replacing the standard funding metric--inflation-adjusted funding per student with the total dollars being appropriated all the way back to 1960. His  key paragraphs read like this: [P]ublic investment in higher education in America is vastly larger today, in inflation-adjusted dollars, than it was during the supposed golden age of public funding in the 1960s. Such spending has increased at a much faster rate than government spending in general. For example, the military’s budget is about 1.8 times higher today than it was in 1960, while legislative appropriations to higher education are more than 10 time...

by Jennifer Ruth,  Portland State University I’ve written before about my experiences at Portland State for Remaking the University . I’ve described effortsmy colleagues and I made to increase tenure-line positions. I’ve explored whythese kinds of efforts are difficult to coordinate and sustain in environments already reliant on non-tenure-track (NTT) instruction. Some of the readers have agreed with me that those of us with tenure should use it to refuse to grow through precarity. They then have taken the next necessary step—a hard look at the numbers. (See, in particular, Matthew H. Clark’s excellent comment on the math at the bottom of thispost .) They ask, as we all must: How realistic is it to push for a return to a majority tenure-line workforce at the typical public university? At Portland State, as at many other state universities across the nation, we have what is now being breezily referred to as “the faculty mix”: tenure-track (TT), full-time non-tenure track (NTT), a...