"I think it’s fairly simple. You know the classic “First they came for the X, then they came for the Y, and I did nothing, and then they came for me?” schtick? This is one of those stories. In fact, it’s the end of one of those stories. They already came for the doctors and the psychiatrists. They already came for the lawyers. They already came for the accountants and auditors. They already came for all the professions. Professors are the last to be broken on the wheel, the last to be put at their station in the new assembly lines of the 21st Century Service Economy."

This is not to say that local homeowners are off the hook. In Ann Arbor, which I studied for my masters thesis, I think they deserved a good bit of blame on some occasions. In many cases former students, when they become homeowners, shift their alliances and values, something we see especially when students of the 60s, 70s, and early 80s reaped the benefits of urban deindustrialization as students with cheap housing and of urban revitalization as homeowners with rising property values.

"Menand focuses on the elite institutions that still concentrate on providing an education in the arts and sciences, and argues that they have failed to respond to these and other painfully obvious problems because they remain stuck in patterns that were set a century and more ago. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he explains, scholars set out to create a limited free space in which they could set standards for the fields they practiced and for undergraduate and graduate training--a professional space dedicated, like the legal and medical professional spaces that took shape at the same time, to pursuing the general good rather than personal gain."

"The students were aware that they’re stepping into an uncertain world but they didn’t seem to grasp the finer points of the media business. Looking at the journalism department’s website later, I could see why. The curriculum lists 29 courses in the journalism program, and not a single one is about the economics of publishing or how to sustain a career as a journalist.

This university is failing it students. I suspect that so are a lot of others."

"It makes a huge difference who can say "take it or leave it" in a negotiation. Right now publishers tend to hold that privileged position. But as prices and cancellations keep rising, the positions are reversing. Even apart from the average balance of bargaining power, slowly shifting to universities, there is the bargaining power over specific titles. The desirability of journals is a matter of degree, despite the binary sound of "must-have". Some high-demand journals may be unthreatened by all recent developments. But the set of unthreatened journals is shrinking, and set for which universities could modify basic terms to better serve research and researchers is growing. For a growing number of journals overall, universities could cancel, threaten to cancel, or bargain effectively, if they wanted to. "

"ACTA has argued--quite convincingly and interestingly--that our accreditation system is badly broken, and has laid out a plan for repairing it. Among the recommendations: break the link between accreditation and federal financial aid. See ACTA's 2007 report, Why Accreditation Doesn't Work and What Policymakers Can Do About it."

"In the industrial model of student mass production, the teacher is the broadcaster. A broadcast is by definition the transmission of information from transmitter to receiver in a one-way, linear fashion. The teacher is the transmitter and student is a receptor in the learning process. The formula goes like this: "I'm a professor and I have knowledge. You're a student, you're an empty vessel and you don't. Get ready, here it comes. Your goal is to take this data into your short-term memory and through practice and repetition build deeper cognitive structures so you can recall it to me when I test you."... The definition of a lecture has become the process in which the notes of the teacher go to the notes of the student without going through the brains of either."

"Look for this stinker to be reversed on appeal. And if it isn’t--whoa, nelly. Strap on for a wild ride. Increasingly the Law says administrations have academic freedom--and you don’t.

Here’s your homework assignment for the day. Ask yourself what “academic freedom for administrators” means."

"Unfortunately, this tendency to overvalue life outside of academia is typical of the demented and deranged. Luckily police were on hand to place Ms. Sheehan-Saldaña in protective custody before she could do further harm to her career."

"Universities are going through a tough time financially. People no longer have to attend them to get the credentials they need. People inside universities think they are selling an experience and that people are turning away from that. I think universities were always selling credentials.

They're just not the only place to get them any more."

"This the right thing to do not only because it is a more realistic assessment of an academic’s worth. It’s also the right thing to do because it helps to build the value of the network. If knowledge and expertise are becoming properties of the network, it is the social responsibility of our institutions to encourage the enhancement of that network."

[Compare with aforementioned Bob Martin's Craftsmanship post...]

"As of today, there's no Craigslist busily destroying the financial foundations of the modern university. Teaching is a lot more complicated than advertising, and universities have the advantage of sitting behind government-backed barriers to competition, in the form of accreditation. Anyone can use the Internet to sell classified ads or publish opinion columns or analyze the local news. Not anyone can sell credit-bearing courses or widely recognized degrees."

"... yet Nature still thinks it's okay to publish a four-paragraph article containing two paragraphs of unsupported speculation about ways in which unions might or might not harm students."

Call or write. This is stupid.

Call or write. This is stupid.

Go listen.

'And it's fundamentally degrading, as an applicant, to have your motives questioned. How do you respond to “I'm just not sure you'd be happy here.”? Especially if part of you agrees?'