The Declaration of Independence

Magnificent. And I too like flaming PPT transitions.

Well played.

I bow before you.

A very serious, thoughtful argument that has never been made in such detail or with such care.

Crooked Timber is just full of win lately. Thank you all very much.

Awesome.

Mr. Jefferson would be proud.

Truly outstanding. TJ no doubt needed a good laugh after spending the previous fortnight spinning in his grave and — thankfully — you have provided it.

Hilarious!

“It’s a forgery. The words ‘entrepreneur’, ‘entrepreneurial’ or ‘entrepreneurship’ nowhere occur.”

No, you forget that Jefferson spent years in France, and that the French don’t even have a word for “entrepreneur.”

Excellent. Just plain excellent. May all here do our part in circulating this Declaration far and wide.

The value of a liberal education revealed.

It’s all the fault of Michael Sandel. He’s doing Youtube and stadium tours in Korea, and these clowns read about it in the New York Times and wondered why not UVa.

Clearly this was dreamed up at Crooked Timber’s Mid-Atlantic Innovation Center by a committed tiger team of paradigm-shifting black belt dynamism evangelists.

i don’t see what the big deal is.

none of you made a big sqawk when they fired Lawrence “Larry” Summers.

the inmates don’t get to run the asylum.

Great post. “Global Effectuity” is priceless.

MAG-F’ing-NI-FI-CENT!!

Are you by chance related to Myles, Kieran?

An-mhaith ar fad.

@30

“the inmates don’t get to run the asylum.”

Brilliant! Let’s extrapolate wildly:

“the citizens don’t get to run the democracy”
“the jurors don’t get to run the jury”
“the senators don’t get to run the senate”
“the guild-members don’t get to run the guild”
“the monks don’t get to run the monastery”
“the partners don’t get to run the partnership”
“the students and masters don’t get to run the universitas scholarium et magistorum”

I love you Kieran!

I love this post! Belle!!!!

I thought the piece was brilliant despite not understanding what the drama was about. Now that I have read extensively about what happened, I can upgrade my opinion to genius. The voice! Kieran, do you actually know this guy or did you acquire his voice solely by reading his emails? Actually, his multiple voices: the inner idiot, the shell of a pompous ass, and the idiot once he begins to realize he is in way over his head, (“Fuck”. “Helen?”) Triple genius!

I’m just a townie who reads the news, but this is the cleverest thing I’ve read in a long, long time. I hope you are well rewarded for your brilliance.

I cannot begin to praise this adequately. Of its choice virtues only gods should speak, or English poets who grew up on all internet traditions.

@49

On this point see this piece, by critics from the “public ivy” of the left coast:

http://reclaimuc.blogspot.com/2012/06/invisibility-of-corporatization-on.html

“For this reason, the conflict between President Sullivan and the Board of Visitors is not a question of running the university “more” or “less” like a business. It is not a conflict between good, old-fashioned “university values” on one hand and nonsensical or inapplicable “business values” on the other. It is rather a conflict between different business models.”

“What appears here as a “contest of worldviews,” one essentially corporate and the other essentially academic, is resurrected in a very different context today. Its appearance is the same, but on scratching the surface it becomes clear that the goalposts have shifted, that the worldview that Kirp identified as so clearly corporate and inappropriate to the university context has simply become part of the norm, a principle so obvious that it no longer seems out of place or offends.”

“It doesn’t make sense to criticize the corporate “mumblespeak” of the strategically dynamic Board of Visitors without at the same time understanding that President Sullivan not only used such language herself but made its implementation at UVA the “signature effort” of her presidency.”

Doh! Well-established “BIT” of corpspeak, not “but.”

@51

I agree, the comment adds some helpful nuance, though there’s still something to ignoring the nuance and embracing the polemical view for a spell.

GiT @54: It’s a tricky business. Fact is, the whole university system is in deep trouble, and has been digging itself ever deeper into the pit for the last four or five decades. Against THAT backdrop this fracas is but a burp. Still, the BOV’s actions betray contempt and deep misunderstanding of the intellectual life of the university and that somehow must be registered. It is, alas, too much to hope that that effort would extend to a complete re-examination of higher education.

Stephen Diamond @49: “the noise currently being made is largely that of a minority”

The UVA Faculty Senate voted No Confidence in the Board by 68 to 2, with one abstention. The Board’s behavior has been condemned by the University’s two former living presidents, by former rectors and board members, by the AAUP, and by the interim president selected by the Board itself. Both the Governor (R) and former Governor (D) who appointed the current board members have criticized their actions. Several thousand people–students, faculty, staff, and alumni–gathered on Monday (in June, with the University not in session) to protest the firing. A Facebook page supporting President Sullivan has over 11,000 members. Newspapers around the state have called for the Rector’s resignation.

The Rector has the expressed support of eleven colleagues on a sixteen-member board, of a wealthy donor, and of her own sister.

On the one hand, if Sullivan’s plan really was to adopt RCM, then firing’s too good for her. On the other hand, if the BOV got even that much right, it could only have been by accident.

Successful corporations and universities are those that evolve mechanisms that prevent the “visionary” idiots who inevitably occupy the upper echelons from doing serious harm to goals of the organization. Those mechanisms seem to be failing with increasing frequency. In this case, hybridization of models apparently created an opportunity for the business “visionary’s” to run amok. UVA is not an isolated case, of course.

But are the supporters of Sullivan suggesting that American universities are NOT in a crisis? Google “law school” and “student debt” and then tell me there isn’t an issue here. Watch Social Network and tell me that it makes sense for Mark Zuckerberg to have stayed for his degree like his classmate Eduardo Saverin. Or Bill Gates? Or Steve Jobs?

What the hell does any of this mean? Nothing going on here has the least bit to do with law schools or student debt as such, and you’re… using a movie to argue about something that doesn’t have any relationship at all to what’s going on. Seriously, this makes zero sense.

@Stephen Diamond @49, please read @Greg Hays @58. Or just come to Charlottesville and see how minor the noise is here.

Jeffrey:

The point is simple, Gates, Jobs and Zuckerberg all dropped out. What used to be considered “counter-cultural” is now being made a norm. In Social Network a clear theme is the irrelevance of traditional 4 years of college (with its stuffy wasp rituals and heavy student debt loads) to the reality of business today. That theme is now being taken to a new level by people like Peter Thiel, an early investor in Facebook, who now recruits people to drop out of graduate school and begin businesses. Entities like Udacity and Singularity are attracting thousands of people around the world and are rewriting the rules and structures of higher education. In other words, what Gates and Jobs did back in the day is increasingly being legitimized, even institutionalized. And the smart universities like Stanford and MIT see the change are trying to get ahead of it. RCM appears to be the way that some schools defend their model while trying to stay afloat fiscally.

Stephen Diamond,

Jeffrey:

It’s not hard to get my name right. I mean, it’s right there at the top of the comment.

The point is simple, Gates, Jobs and Zuckerberg all dropped out. What used to be considered “counter-cultural” is now being made a norm.

Two of those people dropped out of college decades ago (even Zuckerberg’s exodus is close to 10 years past). Gates in particular left with the strong certainty that he wouldn’t go hungry if his venture failed; his father was a prominent lawyer in the Seattle area, so it wasn’t exactly the riskiest proposition for him. In any case, looking at only the success stories is pointless. It’s like saying that Kevin Garnett went straight from high school to the NBA and therefore college is pointless; you’re failing to factor in all the people who dropped out and whose lives were made worse off as a result.

In Social Network a clear theme is the irrelevance of traditional 4 years of college (with its stuffy wasp rituals and heavy student debt loads) to the reality of business today.

You know that The Social Network is, like, a fictional account, right? That certain elements of Harvard are exaggerated due to artistic license? Also, my memory of the movie may not be great but I don’t actually recall where exactly it said anything about debt loads.

This isn’t a serious argument in any case. You can’t say anything interesting about the actual reality of college education today by looking at this movie. The actual reality of life today is that, for better or worse, you need a college degree to get into lots of places. The fact that certain individuals manage to get around that requirement (from positions of extreme privilege, no less), means absolutely nothing for the overwhelming majority of the population. Most people cannot be Gates or Jobs or Zuckerberg, and probably don’t want to be them, and basing any kind of public policy around the idea that everyone should emulate their example is idiotic.

I won’t even get into the much thornier question (which in some ways is actually more relevant here) of your apparent subservience to business interests. Suffice it to say that there’s a case to be made that the university’s mission extends beyond simple vocational skills, and that a wide-ranging education is desirable in and of itself. But whatevs.

That theme is now being taken to a new level by people like Peter Thiel, an early investor in Facebook, who now recruits people to drop out of graduate school and begin businesses.

Yes, Peter Thiel is a terrible person. So what?

Entities like Udacity and Singularity are attracting thousands of people around the world and are rewriting the rules and structures of higher education.

No they aren’t. They’re doing the equivalent of taking a $50 bottle of wine, watering it down to 5 liters, and selling the result at $5 per glass.

In other words, what Gates and Jobs did back in the day is increasingly being legitimized, even institutionalized.

No it’s not. It’s not even the same thing. You just took some things that coincide in time and mashed them together into a single phenomenon.

And the smart universities like Stanford and MIT see the change are trying to get ahead of it.

They’re not doing anything of the sort. You still can’t get a Stanford or MIT credential by taking their online classes, and there’s a reason for that. OpenCourseWare is a great thing and I’m glad it’s available to the public, but it’s not the same as attending MIT.

RCM appears to be the way that some schools defend their model while trying to stay afloat fiscally.

Yes, well, when public commitment to educating the next generation dips to the point where ostensibly public institutions of higher learning get almost no support from the state, it’s highly unsurprising that they will seek out alternate revenue streams.

Presidents and Assholes: The UVa Version (like those college specific versions of Monopoly)

Rules

At any moment during the game, asshole can revoke President’s authority through secret arrangement with 2-3 other players.

Every time someone invokes St. TJ or takes his name in vain take a shot.

Logical fallacy by Rector or BoV member take a shot.

Resignation of leading expert in her/his field from UVa faculty take a shot

Buzz word that only MBA students understand used as if it described an actual thing in the world take a shot.

Resignation of the rector, everyone shotguns a beer.

The game ends when players dissolve into groups to organize protests and write petitions to the Governor.

Winners: nobody

JW: I don’t think nurturing future Zuck’s should be the mission, I only note that is what is, in part, happening.

Jerry, You have an attitude problem so I am not going to get into it with you. Sorry.

I don’t think nurturing future Zuck’s should be the mission, I only note that is what is, in part, happening.

For someone who doesn’t think it should be the mission, you’ve spent an awful lot of time on this thread arguing that it should be.

Sorry, JW, but I don’t see any evidence of advocating what Udacity and Thiel are up to (in fact, you must have seen my criticism of Thiel in my piece on the Facebook IPO and noted that it was part of the entire theme of the article). There is a crisis in higher education. Thiel/Dragas have one point of view about how to deal with the crisis. RCM/Sullivan have another. I don’t support either.

@kiernan

wow (or wahoo!) you nailed it. Very clever.

This entire mess makes me very sad. I don’t see any way for the University to recover from this in the short term, no matter which administrator is chosen to lead.

Did someone really post about “stuffy WASP rituals” as part of American colleges? Let me assure that even at an elite all-male Northeastern college nearly fifty years ago stuffy WASP rituals were so far in the past that it took a lot of curiosity and a lot of effort even to find what they had been.

@GiT #50 Thanks for sharing our post. Here’s an earlier one for folks who are interested in the structural critique of administration:

http://reclaimuc.blogspot.com/2012/06/notes-on-ouster-of-uva-president-teresa.html

@dm #63 Can you expand a little more on your critique of RCM? Especially the second point, about gaming the system.

//

The main point we wanted to emphasize was that it’s absurd to posit that the conflict between Sullivan and the Board of Visitors is one of “university” or “academic” values vs. “corporate” or “business” values. Implicitly or explicitly, this is the framework for most of what’s been written about Sullivan’s ouster. University administration across the country is already based largely on business models. Sullivan’s push for RCM is just one specific example.

Local consensus, JW? Is this a UVA site?

In any case, I do not think my views have either changed or been inconsistent. I maintain that Dragas and the BOV believe, understandably, that UVA has a problem. They did not think Sullivan was intent on solving that problem.

They pushed her out. They made mistakes procedurally and I don’t think the Stanford model, for lack of a better term, is a solution to the problem (in fact it creates very serious problems of its own – for some detail see my review of Phil Mirowski’s new book in Contemporary Sociology).

But that does not mean they were wrong about the existence of the problem.

Just one question for you: why would a scholar who thinks the federal securities law added no value (UVA law dean Paul Mahoney) back Sullivan? What does that tell you about the “local consensus”?

@reclaim UC:

Perhaps by “business” values you mean “neoliberal”? There definitely is a world-wide conflict with those and it has nothing to do with conflicting business models, RCM, or strategic dynamism.

The conflict is with corporate raiders who destroy businesses the second their stock goes down, with the IMF closing hospitals and schools in poor countries the second they cannot service their debt, and with rectors who want to close language departments that to not generate capital and open online courses that they mistakenly believe do.

The conflict is with the sociopaths in academia, corporations, governments, and global institutions who believe that capital is the only from of wealth and are in a position of power to destroy all human endeavor not geared toward short-term capital formation.

I don’t know RCM. In fact, this is the first I’ve ever heard it named. I think I’m familiar with the genre though. Among other critical elements in their implementation, executive judgement and leadership skill is perhaps the most important. Without it, failure is assured.

SubMac:

For a comprehensive overview do the problems see the Statement issued by Dragas today. Most important in my view is her comment about the pace of change at many universities relative to what is happening at Stanford and MIT.

Yeah, latest Dragas e-mail doesn’t make reference to the earlier e-mail’s implication that Sullivan would be reinstated but instead doubles down on why she was fired–looks like a bloodbath is coming at Tue.’s BoV meeting. I predict Sullivan is back in, Dragas out–but who could have predicted what’s already happened??

Tom C,

I don’t think that’s the only reason why they wanted her out although clearly the BOV opponents would like to shape the debate that way. I have raised concerns on our campus about on line learning and agree that it is problematic. But this debate runs much deeper than that. See the Dragas memo today listing ten major areas of concern. The theme I think is the pace of change. And that is a problem many schools and universities face. There is an inertia on college campuses that can border on the absurd.

I think the BOV saw TS as someone, in the fashion of RCM, who was really a captive of the faculty and deans. My guess is there is a substantial group among faculty who think things need to change there too. Of course, in this atmosphere they are remaining silent.

And of course the number of people who would like to see even more radical change to higher education is much smaller and much less vocal. The ReclaimUC group is a nice corrective to that.

S. Diamond,
Right. The other (than online education) 9 factors that Dragas cites strike me as rather–generic–though. That is, not-UVA-specific. I am agnostic about the Sullivan firing, b/c I don’t think she’s really made much of a mark yet (not a criticism–she’s new), but is UVA really going to conjure up a new President that can improve faculty compensation? And, I thought that a UVA-strength was a its de-emphasis on “Big Science”–that seems to have led schools like Rochester from (20th C.) prominence to mediocrity b/c it’s too expensive, and federal funds don’t fully cover it–so, b/c UVA isn’t CalTech or MIT, that should be left relatively small. Prominence in fields like English, history, philosophy, law and (dare I say it?) business is a lot cheaper to attain, and I thought a reason for UVA’s punching above its financial weight amongst US universities.

Bemused,
Yeah, that’s pretty funny that the faculty-student ratio is unchanged and the faculty compensation has increased above the national norm and Dragas is citing those as “crises.”

why would a scholar who thinks the federal securities law added no value (UVA law dean Paul Mahoney) back Sullivan? What does that tell you about the “local consensus”?

I have no idea, and I don’t care.

Thank you for this. But it would be perhaps appropriate to convene an Honor Court to consider the question: Did Ms. Dragas’s actions bring dishonor on the University?

I don’t know what you are smoking, JW, but now you are evidencing the same style of Jeff, err, Jerry V. It is clear that I do not support the Dragas approach and you should not state otherwise. It is inappropriate behavior. Since this is a moderated blog I appeal to the moderator to respond here.

Regarding the role of Dean Mahoney, you were the one who said you cared about my views of the securities markets and yet you do not seem to think it interesting that a leading conservative law and economics figure who has attacked those same securities laws that I think need strengthening, is a leading figure in the anti-Dragas movement. As the Reclaim UC analysis demonstrates there is more to this anti-D movement than you dismissively suggest.

S. Diamond,
Yes, I have, and it doesn’t seem shenanigans have gotten less common since the SEC got involved–I think that’s his modest (and correct) point.
The future of UVa seems more important–I’m still not so sure why these generic issues have crystallized here, but it’s interesting for sure. I still want to hear how Dragas is going to use her power to make UVa more competitive with, say, Penn–she’s what they call “all hat, and no cattle” as far as I can tell.

Dragas has hired Hill and Knowlton. Hill and Knowlton do PR. PR lays astroturf. Just keep that in mind.

@111m Eli Rabett. Nothing like outsourcing stupidity! No doubt the H&K flack had, in turn, farmed it out to one of the Nigerian letter scammers.

I got it: Take Yudoff from UCal, the UVa BOV, JP Tudor’s billions, and let then establish a charter city for distant learning in Honduras, where, I hear, the legal machinery is already in place. I call it a winwinwinwin situation, a big w4! Bananas for everyone.

Bill Benzon: Reclaim UC suggests that Sullivan was a protege of Yudof. Should she join him on the island?

But to dismiss the conflict blithely as some have done as a battle between a corporate takeover and heroic intellectuals is to argue reductio ad absurdum.

No, it’s to have one’s eyes open and not be an idiot. (Only an idiot would have the time of day for an arrogant real estate developer who thinks her money and her head full of B-school buzzwords qualify her to run a university.) Your position, to make sense, requires Sullivan to be seen as ignoring the challenges you cite. That’s a long way from being the case.

I don’t know whether the Sullivan backers here actually teach or work or study at a university where everyday you have to grapple with how exactly one matches the need to prepare young people to survive in the real world with the cost of doing so in an economic environment that insures that most will be paying off debt for decades.

But I do.

Curse the CT formatting demons. Seriously though, I do not understand the sense of proportion exhibited here. A professor who has the wrong ideas about regulation couldn’t be right about Dragas but The Social Network proves something about academia?

Here are the very broad strokes: 50% of the population can’t or don’t go to college. 50% of the half that do don’t graduate. That leaves 25% who do but half of those can’t get serious work when they do. That leave 12.5%.

Of the 12.5% half could probably succeed with out graduating with a degree anyway (the Zucks).

That leaves 6.25%. Probably 75% of those graduate with significant sometimes overwhelming debt loads.

Ask yourself if we were starting from scratch whether we would build the massive higher education capital plant (human and physical) on the basis of that 6.25% and then force them to finance it?

Now go ahead and offhandedly tear apart the stats but a year from now the problem will not have gotten any closer to resolution, it will have gotten worse. That is the nature of the threat that I think the BOV (and Sullivan) are trying to grapple with.

I don’t know whether the Sullivan backers here actually teach or work or study at a university where everyday you have to grapple with how exactly one matches the need to prepare young people to survive in the real world with the cost of doing so in an economic environment that insures that most will be paying off debt for decades.

One does not need to assume that Sullivan is a saint in order to see that her opponents are worse. I mean, I read the reclaimUC post (and as a Berkeley alum I agree with virtually all of it); I’m willing to believe that Sullivan isn’t made of puppies and rainbows. On the other hand, she seemed (from my distant vantage point) to be at least nominally concerned about running a university like, you know, a university, and not like a business.

For what it’s worth, I do work at an Institution of Higher Learning, but my job has nothing to do with teaching. On the other hand, I am one of those young people you speak of.

But I do. And while I have deep politcal differences with the approach of Dragas et al I nonetheless recognize in the Dragas memo the essence of the challenge facing all of higher education today. We are laboring under a Clark Kerr cold war model in an era that is dramatically different economically and technologically.

What challenges, exactly? And why do you think the Clark Kerr model is irreparably broken? Or to put the question another way: who broke it?

That’s not idle speculation. We didn’t just randomly end up here somehow, we weren’t teleported to this stage of affairs. What’s happening at UVA, and Berkeley, and other public institutions of their stature (and will soon, if it hasn’t already, filter down from those places) is the product of a decades-long campaign to undermine universities as places of learning and inquiry. None of this is accidental, and people like Dragas who bleat on about strategic dynamisms and what have you are instrumental in accomplishing this. I don’t believe for one fraction of one millisecond that Dragas and her ilk have any interest whatsoever in solving the real problems of higher education (one of which, as you acknowledge, is the debt load). They nothing but profiteers, and if they could make an extra dollar by burning UVA to the ground, they’d do it in a heartbeat.

Nothing about the situation at UVA is pretty. But to dismiss the conflict blithely as some have done as a battle between a corporate takeover and heroic intellectuals is to argue reductio ad absurdum.

Besides an incorrect use of the concept of the reductio, you also showcase a completely false dichotomy. We don’t have to believe that Sullivan is a “heroic intellectual” and the corporate takeover of public higher education is already a fact anyway. The question is: is that takeover the right solution to the problems of higher ed? Is it a good solution? For whom? The increasing privatization of universities is certainly a great solution for a small cadre of rich people who profit from it (c.f. most of the UC regents) and a terrible solution for the students (and I would posit for society as a whole).

Here are the very broad strokes: 50% of the population can’t or don’t go to college. 50% of the half that do don’t graduate. That leaves 25% who do but half of those can’t get serious work when they do. That leave 12.5%.

Of the 12.5% half could probably succeed with out graduating with a degree anyway (the Zucks).

That leaves 6.25%. Probably 75% of those graduate with significant sometimes overwhelming debt loads.

Are these numbers even remotely close to reality? Let’s say they are; are you seriously claiming that we’re “build[ing] the massive higher education capital plant (human and physical) on the basis of that 6.25% and then forc[ing] them to finance it?” Do you have any evidence for this?

Yes, student debt is a serious problem! I agree! But the solution is not destroying the idea of the university altogether; we could, if we wanted to, renew our commitment to public higher education in the form of increased state support. But that would require someone to pay a little more in taxes, and we can’t have that, so I guess we’ll just have to destroy the university in order to save it. Or something.

re: #142 Hill and Knowlton

H&K: now nice. It is famed for <a href="http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/tid/xrd37b00/pdf&quot;, i.e., the "Frank Statement, p.5-" which was advertised in 400+ newspapers. The Tobacco Industry Research Council was set up in H&K offices.

Viewed from a PR perspective, H&K did a terrific job helping the tobacco companies under John Hill, who had himself stopped smoking years earlier for health reasons.

I didnt write the above for what its worth, so either there’s an impersonator (!) or somethings wrong with the site or my computer. Either way, I doubt anyone cares

she seemed (from my distant vantage point) to be at least nominally concerned about running a university like, you know, a university, and not like a business.

Right. And this is what Stephen Diamond and Draga object to.

student debt is a serious problem! I agree! But the solution is not destroying the idea of the university altogether; we could, if we wanted to, renew our commitment to public higher education in the form of increased state support. But that would require someone to pay a little more in taxes, and we can’t have that, so I guess we’ll just have to destroy the university in order to save it.

Exactly. Student debt is a problem, but to go from that to the idea that universities should be reinvent themselves as staffing services for venture capitalists is a bit of a leap.

should a university’s revenues exceed its costs?

I think you meant this the other way round? Either way, it’s a silly question. Education is not a kind of business, it’s a public good.

JW, since my question was too silly for you (perhaps the complexities of life under capitalism escape you, perhaps you are independently wealthy and can ignore them), but as the rest of us must grapple with these complexities let me pose a few tougher ones: do you think the bondholders who have invested hundreds of millions in UVA bonds expect the university’s revenues to exceed its costs? Do you think the stewards of UVA’s multi-billion dollar endowment should invest University funds in entities where revenues exceed costs?

Dave2, Now people are putting ideas (mistaken, of course) into my head. The level of intellectual imperialism on this site is laughable.

Brilliant and hilarious. Thanks very much for writing this.

Stephen:
Raya is a 100% correct about universities’ purposes and, consequently, the answer to your question concerning investing is yes. So long as the money goes to improving a college or university’s ability to serve its core mission, which rules out — I think — climbing walls and better paid administrators.

“Now people are putting ideas (mistaken, of course) into my head”

It would appear that these mistaken ideas will find plenty of company in the existing contents.

Interestingly, in spite of Dragas’ talk of cutting classics and German, UVA is required by Virginia law to teach Latin Greek and German:

§ 23-63. Branches of learning to be taught.

The following branches of learning shall be taught at the University:
the Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, Spanish, Italian, German, and
Anglo-Saxon languages; the different branches of mathematics, pure and
physical; natural philosophy, chemistry, mineralogy, including
geology; the principles of agriculture; botany, anatomy, surgery, and
medicine; zoology, history, ideology, general grammar, ethics,
rhetoric, and belles lettres; civil government, political economy, the
law of nature and of nations and municipal law.

(Code 1919, § 817.)

should a university’s revenues exceed its costs?

The whole point of public education is that the revenues supplied by students and donors fall short of costs. The disappearance of that model in the U.S. is a bad thing, not a good one.

I’ve known Paul Mahoney for a long time, btw, and — while I haven’t spoken to him about l’affaire Dragas — I think it’s a fair assumption that he opposed the firing because he believes that universities should be run by people who know something about them, rather than people who don’t.

The distinction some try to draw here between a business and a university is a false one. Both are capitalist institutions. Both serve the larger purposes of a capitalist society. One organizes and exploits labor, the other trains labor and future bosses for their place in the system. For a helpful discussion see Hal Draper’s essay The Mind of Clark Kerr.

A small handful try to exploit the relative openness of a university environment to promote alternatives. I am sceptical that life for such advocates would be materially different under a Sullivan/Yudof regime than under the kind of regime one finds at Stanford or MIT.

The UVA situation is a battle among two competing factions of capital trying to deal with the combination of a fiscal crisis and a technological challenge to the established university structure. Anyone no matter how “progressive” trying to lead such an institution will have to bend to the will of the larger context. Just as the multiculturalist social democrat Obama ends up masterminding drone/special ops warfare to maintain US global power, the Canadian social democrat chancellor at Berkeley Bob Birgeneau ends up calling the cops to crush student/faculty protest. Sullivan would likely do the same under similar circumstances.

The goal must be to change the wider context. At the level of the university, one way forward is to use this situation to promote alternative forms of governance of the university, such as mandating faculty and staff representatives on the board of trustees. That at least would provide some potential for arguing for the values that some here think ought to govern a university.

At UVA, of course, promoting the end to right to work laws would also help. I wonder what the sociologist of work, President Sullivan, has tried to do about that.

Raya, the high priest of an Egyptian temple would also describe his job as protecting human civilization. The costs of doing so rose exponentially and eventually bankrupted the New Kingdom. Not every enterprise with nobly described aims is good, especially in higher education. One need only think about “expanding access” and the way it becomes a smokescreen for avarice.

Jerry, the costs of Berkley are increasingly administration. The obvious remedy is not less profit orientation but more: noting that administrators generally add nothing to the sum of human knowledge, despite costing quite a bit. Arguing that we shouldn’t consider how our means relate to our ends is a nonstarter.

Ah JW you’re back. Tell me then which side are you on: do you support the proposal to include faculty and staff on university boards? If not what do you propose as a constructive step forward in the face of this crisis?

Peter T – you were for a united front in the 30s, really?

This was brilliant. I’ve come back to reread it several times. Thanks.

Fantastic. The good guys win for once.

Maybe CT should find someone to write about what went right here. We on the liberal/left political world have a bad habit of dwelling on our defeats and not learning from our successes. Obviously the Board sabotaged themselves here, but I’m sure there are still things to learn from what made the response effective.

Adding a link just because.

Phil Ochs said it all:

No, Substance, that’s what any rational objective person would say if they tried to sort out what is happening in higher education. Two models are battling for control, with liberals naively picking sides – the lesser evil, one might say.

I put a concrete proposal for an alternative approach on the table here and have not yet seen any response to it or any other way out of this crisis.

Question for the academics: would you take that job back after what has occurred? In the corporate world a general career management principle is ‘never go back’; would that be good advice here?

Cranky

I’d take the job–the jet is perk that i couldn’t pass up.