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The Broken University

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Hawkeye10

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Don’t Blame Politics for the Crisis at American Colleges
Campus life has been increasingly riled by controversies over perceived offenses. An administrative culture is partly responsible
In the balance between encouraging a clash of ideas and prioritizing stability, the rise in power of college administrators has tipped the scales immeasurably. Dr. Jonathan Zimmerman of the University of Pennsylvania, an education historian, told me that the “number of full-time faculty members has consistently declined” since the mid-1960s. He added that administrative growth took off during the same era, with non-teaching staff outnumbering professors from the 1990s onward.

Predictably, the administrator-run campus has transitioned from imparting essential knowledge to students toward treating students as customers. Zimmerman took note of the most visible element of the customer-service college: the surge of pricey construction projects such as “climbing gyms and luxury dorms” (although he noted that beneficial services such as mental health counseling have also grown from the same impulse to cater to students).
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This crisis of confidence at colleges—driven by conflict-shy administrators and self-effacing professors—has come to a head in the culture of protest that has developed on American campuses. Once again, political polarization is only one part of the story. Today’s college students are certainly more liberal and more ideologically uniform than their counterparts of the mid-twentieth century. But the focus on the little things that we see in campus protests—as in the movement to suppress insensitive Halloween costumes at Yale in 2015—shows the extent to which the political fervor is being driven by the absence of bigger, richer ideas to seize students’ attention.
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https://newrepublic.com/article/140320/dont-blame-politics-crisis-american-colleges


Really good piece from a nobody framing the situation in some unusual ways. I noticed that the University was gravely ill way back in the mid 80's when I was at Michigan State and I am well aware that things have only gotten worse, but the exact reasons for the continuing drive to death rarely get talked about at all much less with the level of insight of this argument.

A must read.
 
I can't argue with much of that and yeah, with so many admins, they have to try to justify their bloated salary by making issues of nothing and building totally unneeded massive structures. However, i would argue this is mostly at colleges that need to bring in "customers" At the elite schools, there is under-funded dorms from the 1970s still (i stayed at one for a year), while at the same time there is way overpriced luxury apartments built by the private sector for all the spoiled brats. My first roommate left after a single day to one of these, eating the full cost of the dorm room as well, once he saw how "ghetto" his assigned room was (as they all were, built in the 70s)

Also the "life sciences" buildings and the like that cost of tens of millions have been raised by private donations, once again from overly rich alum

I also don't think they've reduced the # of professors at such places much if any. Tuition has skyrocketed, true, but again, the overly rich subsidize everyone else

I think what they fail to notice is that at Yale, such protests happen just because they can. Spoiled brats are able to set aside real world concerns in this way. That doesn't necessarily happen at your local commuter where everyone has to work **** jobs alongside their studies

But there's no disputing that as an average, # of admins has gone way up and professors and quality of teaching down
 
The momentous but gradual change over the last 30 years in the proportion of full-time, tenured, and tenure-track professors to contingent professors has reversed itself. Now, approximately 76% of college professors are contingent labor, predominantly hired on a semester-by-semester contract and making an average of $2500 per 3-credit course.
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When colleges rely on adjuncts, it's the students who lose | PBS NewsHour

In other words " make waves and you will be gone".

Who did this?

University Administrations.
 
"In truth, many Americans, not just Murray’s poor whites, have lost patience with people who don’t respect the reverence for freedom of conscience, thought, and speech on which America was founded."

Agreed.
 
Conservative pundit Ann Coulter vows to hold Berkeley event despite university cancellation




Coulter said she would call the university's �“bluff” by agreeing to rules set by the university seeking to prevent violence. The university decided to cancel her appearance next week after assessing the violence that flared on campus in February when the same college Republican group invited right-wing provocateur and former Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos to speak.


 
Hawkeye10 said:
When colleges rely on adjuncts, it's the students who lose | PBS NewsHour

In other words " make waves and you will be gone".

Who did this?

University Administrations.
Click to expand...

I think that is a good thing at undergraduate level business schools. The adjunct professors can relate the class material to their real world experiences. They also care about teaching because they are doing out because they want to not because they have to. Almost all of my favorite professors have been adjunct, and all of the worst were tenured.
 
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