BY JOHN McNAY Colleges and universities are being pummeled by the financial impact of the coronavirus. Every day brings more bad news: cuts to state support, large deficits, questionable fall enrollment, and questions as to what degree campuses will be open. Yet, amid the human tragedy, we should see the crisis as an opportunity for…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH The title of this post comes from an op-ed written by Michael A. MacDowell, President Emeritus of Misericordia University and managing director of the Calvin K. Kazanjian Foundation, for the March 18 edition of the Naples News in Florida. The foundation was created in 1947 by the founder of the candy…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Here is a short but telling item from the Hechinger Report: “The number of executive, administrative and managerial employees on university campuses nationwide continued its relentless rise right through the recession, up by a collective 15 percent between 2007 and 2014, federal data show. “”Hear a SpareMin podcast on this topic here with Matt…
BY BRIAN C. MITCHELL In the Hechinger Report’s recent story, “University Bureaucracies Grew 15 Percent During the Recession, Even as Budgets Were Cut and Tuition Increased,” reporter Jon Marcus examined the confounding trend that many university systems are showing “new resolve . . . to improve the efficiency and productivity of stubbornly labor-intensive higher education”…
BY MARTIN KICH If you have been reading the posts in my series “Mismanagement and No Meaningful Oversight” (I have actually gotten several items behind in terms of re-posting those items from our chapter blog to this blog), you are aware of some of the issues that have been reaching critical mass at Wright State…
BY MARTIN KICH A professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks has proposed a new vision for the University of Alaska, which will focus on the core mission of the University of Alaska and help UA raise over $900 million in additional research and tuition revenues over the next ten years. A new proposal, developed…
The federal data that will be presented in this series of posts was analyzed by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting (NCIR) in collaboration with the American Institutes for Research. The NECIR story on the data and its implications, written by Jon Marcus, who is currently an editor at the Hechinger Report, is…
This resolution is the last of four presented and unanimously endorsed at The Ohio Conference annual meeting on November 7. Whereas an analysis of the effectiveness of institutions of higher learning indicated that the ideal ratio for full-time faculty to each administrator should be three to one; (i) Whereas accrediting agencies recognize that having many…
Writing for Nation of Change, Paul Buchheit has provided a very succinct but comprehensive overview of how corporatization has had a very damaging impact on higher education. In his article “Higher Education: Capitalism at Its Most Despicable,” Buchheit focuses on five inter-linked phenomena that are undermining the value of higher education because they undermine the…