Alan Aja, Joseph Entin, and Jeanne Theoharis identify the true crime in higher education: the abandonment of public higher education by the states and the federal government. The three authors are professors at Brooklyn College, which is part of the City University of New York (CUNY).
They write:
The biggest scandal in American higher education today is the staggering disinvestment in public universities like CUNY, even as politicians and the public pay lip service to abhorring the inequalities in higher education. What would it mean to view as scandalous the well-documented decline in federal and state funding of public universities across the country over the last 25 years, at the same time students have been expected to shoulder the cost of those “missing expenditures” through tuition hikes (amid other persistent cuts to federal and state financial aid and vital support services)? What would it mean to view self-declared “education governor” Andrew Cuomo of New York as a part of the problem for the ways he has underfunded public universities in the state and to see members of the public who allow this as his accomplices? What would it mean to see the scandal that the broken ceiling exposes as part of a larger systemic problem directly tied to the current state budget’s continued underfunding of CUNY (which once again this time around, fell dramatically short)?
Nearly a quarter of a million undergraduates attend the City University of New York, and they are caught in a vicious bind. Tuition for CUNY — which was free until 1975 — has risen by 31% since 2011. It now stands at $6,730 for full-time students at CUNY’s senior colleges on top of the high costs of housing, food, transportation, books and other personal expenditures in New York City, where the majority of students attending CUNY come from families with incomes of $30,000 or less.
At the same time, CUNY’s per-pupil funding declined by 18% between 2008 and 2018.
Think of it. Students used to be able to enroll in a public university at minimal cost, or none at all. Now, they are saddled with debt for years after they finish college–if they finish. As Sara Goldrick-Rab wrote in her prize-winning book “Paying the Price,” the main reason that low-income students drop out of college is not because of their lack of motivation or ability, but because they can’t afford to pay the costs.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I “LIVED” this HORROR. Tuition and books kept rising and FAST, too. I remember the ‘games.’
So many negatives re: higher education in CO happened when ex-Senator Hank Brown became president of UNC. Then after UNC, ex-Senator Hank Brown (GOP) became president of CU-Boulder. DEEP POCKETS were at work.
Heck BVPS had a superintendent of schools who had just retired from the A.F. Military Academy in Colorado Springs. This superintendent didn’t last his contract, but got a golden parachute when he resigned. HUH?
And now the state of Colorado wants to dictate to PUBLIC School teachers … HOW TO TEACH READING. Seems the phonicatos and O-G folks are doing their dastardly deeds.
Lucky us … NOT.
I smell ALEC, or at least Koch. CBK
I wrote an oped in November on the occasion of the Kochs establishing a center at TN state university
Click to access kochoped3.pdf
Mate Wierdl The Kochs’ ideological infringement on academics, including having a say in choosing professors, is notorious at George Mason University. The students finally broke through the secrecy and rallied against it–there is some push-back (Google GMU-Koch) which anyone should read for balance, but also see:
http://www.unkochmycampus.org/charles-koch-foundation-george-mason-mercatus-donor-influence-exposed
CBK
CBK, are you associate with George Mason?
Mate Wierdl No. I am not associated with George Mason University. CBK
$6730 . Is this the annual cost or the total cost ?
Annual tuition only…… Budget crises began as soon as I arrived in 1971 as a young AsstProf at CUNY’s Staten Island Comm Coll, continued yearly, despite escalating resistance by young faculty hired for the Open Admission program and students, culminated in a lock-out by CUNY authorities during finals week in May 1976. As thousands protested, the renegade faculty union fled safely into hiding, went to their offices looking for leadership, found none. Long story that got worse each decade. Now, no janitors in my classroom building, toilets an abomination, no hot water, lights broken, etc., a once-promising site of cultural democracy conquered into ruin by politicians who gave $6 billion in public subsidies to the glittering new Hudson Yards and offered another $3billion to Amazon. A robust mass movement brought open access to CUNY 50 years ago and another will be needed to restore CUNY.
The Hudson Yard subsidy is closer to the same 3 billion that was offered to Amazon. The extension of the 7 line was not done specifically for the Hudson Yards. It had been a long time goal to do the project. Although it was easier to accomplish as part of a West Side development plan; after the Stadium and Olympic bid failed. But Related industries is as vile as Amazon in any event.
Diane had a front row seat to the circumstances under which free tuition was killed in CUNY.
Gates and Arnold sponsored a higher ed session at Bipartisan Policy Center, a lobby shop, in Sept. The only university panelist listed was the former Kaplan, now Purdue Global. The two politicians listed were K-12 school privatizers, Susan Davis and George Miller. (BPC privatized natural gas decisions for a client a few years ago.) BPC just recently began its higher ed initiative.
In March, PPIC posted a recommendation to give authority for all of the publicly supported universities in Calf. to an outside council, dispensing with consensus decision making and diverse representation.
Gates’ Frontier Set gives grants for university collaboration on curriculum and delivery.
The universities and colleges should not get a pass here.
The amount that some university presidents and other college administrators get paid is grotesque.
Many colleges and universities have become businesses and have totally lost sight of their original purpose.
The game is not just being played by the parents but by the college officials who seem to be fine with students up to the hilt in loans as long as they keep getting paid.
The presidents’ job description is to get wealthy people to donate.
Nothing ranks higher than that.
The public George Mason University provides proof.
Why do public university professors design products and marketing for privatized education as part of the academic departments’ mission? Arnold gives money to create ed centers.
Linda, at my university, we get evaluated based on how much money we bring in to the university. We now have a so called millionaires’ club which consists of people who brought in more a million $.
It is also problematic that university profs, who are paid by the public, do work for private companies. In many cases, they are not even allowed to publish their work, though our work is supposed to benefit the public.
Generally speaking, the highest paid group at public research universities are football and basketball coaches, followed by physician/administrators in the medical school, followed by the university president/chancellor, and the senior leadership team of the university.
Diane and SomeDAMPoet: Below is an example (from Inside Higher Education) of what happens when universities are expected to follow capitalist-ONLY principles (as presently defined) rather than educating students to think beyond those principles. In this case, the culprit is the Catholic Church; but the same imbalanced regard for (worship of?) capitalism over offering a qualified education (by their own standards) is a drift towards danger that’s going on in higher education overall.
Unfortunately, the present Republican thrust has changed to be ONLY political and where offering and getting the fullness of a liberal education is now associated with “those democrats” and so is anathema to the corrupted viewpoint of many who claim to be Republicans. See below: CBK
“Inside Higher Education Daily News
A Jesuit University Without History or Philosophy?
Wheeling Jesuit eliminates all majors in liberal arts, keeping pre-professional programs and athletics. Many tenured professors are losing jobs. »”
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/04/05/two-years-after-rescue-wheeling-jesuit-guts-faculty-programs?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=8ba0ed8467-DNU_2019_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-8ba0ed8467-198488425&mc_cid=8ba0ed8467&mc_eid=f743ca9d07
So sad and not typical for a Jesuit university.
It is likely that we will see more schools close in the coming years or change to concentrate on educating nontraditional students. The college age population in the US is expected to drop by 15% between 2025 and 2029. See https://hechingerreport.org/college-students-predicted-to-fall-by-more-than-15-after-the-year-2025/
To Teachingeconomist: An ignorant electorate fits right in with the long-term Oligarch, lobby-loving Republican game plan. CBK
And, that drop will be magnified in importance in the PR that precedes disaster capitalism’s solution.
Hechinger’s drumbeat of low enrollment and, its solution, Gates’ Frontier Set, which is a collaboration on curriculum and delivery, is on record.
“Independent” reporting while receiving Gates funding…really?
Has Hechinger’s ever written about a different solution, you know, like raising taxes on the wealthy?
Follow the money is always a good rule.
Linda Funny you should mention the political foundations of Hechinger’s. Also, the Koch’s are trying to supplant Departments of Economics in universities with their own entire departments and their “Koch University” graduates in “economics.” CBK
Linda,
It is not a function of the publication outlet, but rather the decline in births during the recent recession (see https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SPDYNCBRTINUSA). There will simply be fewer traditional college age students in the future than there were in the past, and so there should be fewer colleges and universities than in the past.
Developed nations take presented opportunities to improve institutions.
The Koch/Gates oligarchy and a 3rd world nation make opportunities to deprive and exploit, reducing the circumstances of the 99%, which defines colonialism.
Funding from taxes on the richest 0.1% would enable students to pay less- fewer students, more money to help the 85%.
The financial industry-caused recession bordering on a depression, financial calamity that brought the nation to its knees in 2008, resulted in fewer births which I presume is the explanation for the right wing’s recent attack on birth control.
If Gates was man enough he’d take on the financial sector that drags down GDP by 2%.
te is a pedant.
Diane Link below to an article in Non-Profit Quarterly re the systematic corruption of democracy by big donors who give, but who also seek power that, known or not, usurps democratic forces. See snip then link: Foxes-Henhouses and Billionaire Philanthropists Eradicating Inequality?
“Placing a rich hedge fund manager in a co-equal position with public governance is anti-democratic and, where the public schools are concerned, doomed to be counter-productive in terms of lived-out notions of equity.—Ruth McCambridge”
https://nonprofitquarterly.org/2019/04/10/foxes-henhouses-and-billionaire-philanthropists-eradicating-inequity/?utm_source=NPQ+Newsletters&utm_campaign=f70529abab-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_01_11_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_94063a1d17-f70529abab-12886885&mc_cid=f70529abab&mc_eid=cc73fe1cff
Or we add more and more highly paid administrators. Levels.
Absolutely. And can we also please stop talking about elite, expensive colleges and universities to the exclusion of all others?
It’s ridiculous. The vast, vast, vast majority of people don’t go to these places. They’re completely irrelevant to most of us.
Maybe we could get some “college diversity”. Hear from some of the other 10,000 colleges. Give someone else a chance to talk.
I wonder if the abandonment of public schools and public colleges and universities coincides with the fact that fewer and fewer people in power attended one, or send their children to one.
Elite private schools are GROSSLY over-represented as far as clout and influence.
The under funding of state universities is all part of the disinvestment in the common good. A higher percentage of responsibility for tuition has fallen on the shoulders of working families. At the same time the college loan business has been booming, and many students are unable to complete degrees due to costs, or they graduate deeply in debt. Our current head of the DOE has a history of investment in the college loan business. Under DeVos the DOE has promoted deregulation of the loan business in order to create an environment that is lucrative to investors while it puts students into more debt. This move shows the lack of concern the current administration has in helping aspiring students from working families.
The United States is concerned because fewer students are completing degrees at a pace with other nations. Yet, it is unwilling to invest students’ futures. A recent “happiest country” indicated that the happiest countries were once again Scandinavia and most of northern Europe. These are all places that offer free or low cost public tuition to students. Bill Maher recently said, “Maybe the key to happiness is not being rich. Maybe it is not having to worry about what you don’t have …. like health care” and I would add tuition debt.
The federal government are actually the worst about this. They CLEARLY see two tiers of students, with elite private colleges and universities on top, and cheap, gimmicky online classes for the bottom 90%:
View at Medium.com
They don’t have any interest in sustaining or supporting public colleges or universities because none of them would be caught dead in one.
We should start hiring public employees who have some commonality of experience with 90% of the public they serve. We’ll get better and more responsive government.
State government has SETDA.
In Florida many of the courses in the community college system are cheap, cyber courses. Scott was pushing his $10,000 college degree, made possible through an abundance of boring, cyber courses.
Every President in my adult lifetime has said they recognize that MOST people go to public colleges, universities or community colleges and every single one has promised to support those schools, but NONE of them have done it.
Why is that? I think it’s because none of them went to school in a public college or university or community college. They don’t even know people who did.
The ed guy at New America went to a public university. Most of the ed staff at PPIC went to public universities. You can read online what those two think tanks propose.
Paying people to pull up behind them the ladder they climbed.
Whether Democrat or Republican , our Presidents simply lack the experience in common with ordinary Americans that is required to understand and empathize with what most Americans are going through.
Trump obviously does not represent the vast majority but neither did Obama, who was so busy bailing out his buddies at the big banks (Jamie Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein) that he had no time or money for the underwater homeowner or small business owner.
Our privileged Presidents, having been groomed at schools like Harvard, Yale and Wharton have been insulated from the reality that most of us experience and when they get to the Whitehouse they continue to surround themselves with more of the same unreality.
I dunno the meaning of a “public university” is. Most public universities (all in Tennessee) have Boards consisting of businessmen, pushing their own or their business friends interest, being busy with transforming their university to serve private goals.
Privatization of public universities has been in full force, and the still powerful tenured faculty is just standing by. How come teachers strike, but we barely hear anything from universities?
My feeling is the fight for the tenure system happened too long ago, and profs just don’t appreciate what it means to have academic freedom and tenure until it’s taken away.
Ask profs about the meaning of academic freedom and tenure and you only get generic answers at best.
How do you fire profs up?
I farmed my way through the local public university between 1973 and 1978. My meager income as a dairy farmer got my brother and I through the degree we got there largely because taxpayers funded the program’s there and I had only a small part to pay. It was not complicated. Now students are responsible for huge chunks of money that are supplemented by grants and scholarships and loans, oh my. Like so many other things in today’s world, what used to be pretty simple is made complex. Sometimes I think is is on purpose.
I think the more complex factors have to do with the financial services’ lobbyists that try to ensure their enrichment through other people’s debt. The only word of advice for young people from our government, sadly, is “caveat emptor.”
Caveat emptor justifies targeting the most vulnerable. It’s the favorite slogan of sociopaths.
May I ask, Roy, which university was it?
It would seem as if there was a plan. We make tuition high at Public Universities. Parents and students saddled with debt start looking at a College education as merely a ticket to a career; a vocational program rather than a broad-based education. . Humanities and Social Sciences get cut. and fulltime staff get replaced by adjuncts with no tenure and no security. Gone are those pesky students and Professors who would challenge the “Enterprise System”.
And I wonder how many low paid adjuncts? Rising costs. Lower paid instructors?
More than 60% of the teaching in universities is done by part-timers,
The part-timers who are now a majority of college faculty are paid by the course and do not get benefits. They live on poverty wages. Yet the same universities are flush with money to build gorgeous student facilities and pay six- and seven-figure salaries to the president and professors of medicine and coaches.
I do not believe that 60% figure is correct for part timers. When I have seen it quoted, it usually refers to non-tenure stream faculty. Many non-tenure stream faculty are employed full time, and are paid well, though generally below that of the tenure stream faculty.
Our sources disagree.
https://www.aaup.org/issues/contingency/background-facts
The AAUP says the proportion of non-tenure track faculty is over 70%.
Contingent” faculty positions include both part- and full-time non-tenure-track appointments.
Their common characteristic is that institutions make little or no long-term commitment to faculty holding these positions.
Today, more than half of all faculty appointments are part-time.
This includes positions that may be classified by the institution as adjuncts, part-time lecturers, or graduate assistantships.
Many faculty in so-called “part-time” positions actually teach the equivalent of a full-time course load.
Other part-time appointments are held by graduate student employees, whose chances of obtaining tenure-track positions in the future are increasingly uncertain.What is billed as a teaching apprenticeship often instead amounts to years of intensive, low-paid work that distracts from, rather than complementing, graduate studies.
To support themselves, part-time faculty often commute between institutions and prepare courses on a grueling timetable, making enormous sacrifices to maintain interaction with their students.
Since faculty classified as part-time are typically paid by the course, without benefits, many college teachers lack access to health insurance and retirement plans. Back to top
Both part- and full-time non-tenure-track appointments are increasingly prevalent.
Non-tenure-track positions of all types now account for over 70 percent of all instructional staff appointments in American higher education. This chart compares tenure-line and contingent appointments 1975–2015.
Here is some good recent data about faculty at post secondary institutions: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/10/12/about-three-quarters-all-faculty-positions-are-tenure-track-according-new-aaup
At my university, the number of full time instructors has increased by 40% in the last 10 years while the number of tenured profs has decreased by 5%.
I think there are a couple of reasons for the increased use of full time NTS faculty. Increased flexibility in staffing is probably the most important reason, but I think increased emphasis on teaching at research universities has resulted in replacing tenure stream faculty that are only part time teachers (40% of effort devoted to teaching) with NTS faculty who are full time teachers.
The most important reason for the startling percentage of non-tenured faculty—now 70% of all faculty in higher education—is cost-cutting. Universities make choices about how to allocate resources. They pay star salaries to woo star faculty. Tenure is a luxury. Meanwhile, the 70% who are adjuncts are paid a bare living wage. Or less.
Adjuncts need to work at 4-5 different higher ed institutions to scrape up a living. The have no time for office hours, they drive around town all day long. At the same time, coaches get 30-70% raises. Online classes increase.
dianeravitch I was an adjunct for years at several colleges and universities. Besides low pay, we had few or no perks (like health insurance and copy services); we were easily manipulated and had zero political voice.
By manipulated, I mean, for instance, having a grassroots reputation, filling classrooms via that reputation, and then having the powers-that-be kick you out of the classroom to put in someone (with a little more expensive job security) who happened not to fill their own classes. “Bye bye. Sorry about that,” and when we may have turned down other courses which are not already covered–resulting in no job for a semester. CBK
I’d like to emphasize that, while no doubt, universities try to attract “star faculty” with high salaries, that’s not where the vast majority of savings goes. It goes to increase administration and to build buildings endlessly.
This is what you can read about and this is what’s confirmed (at least the salary part) clearly by the data I compiled for my university
Click to access 2019senate_salary.pdf
To see new buildings, educationally absolutely necessary new structures like a clock tower during these hard times, just go to any campus.
That “increased flexibility” is killing the tenure system. Our class sizes increase, so students don’t benefit one bit from hiring instructors. We have had 3 tenured people retire or die in the last 4 years, we got no replacements. They say, they save money with the nontenured hires, but in fact the savings all go to increase admins.
Universities are supposed to do both research and teaching.
I think tenured faculty, at least at R1 universities, have made themselves extremely expensive relative to the revenues they generate. At top 30 departments in my field, the starting salary is $130,000, the teaching load is 3 courses a term but there must be at least 1 year of leave before tenure, at least a semester of leave every 7 years, and rather than teaching the students who pay tuition to the university, they typically teach Ph.D. students who bring in no revenue. Oh, and a tenure track hire this year will likely to be employed by the university until about 2070.
Meanwhile the non-tenure track faculty are paid like serfs.
Which is true and hence tenured profs have been replaced by them.
Btw, what happens in business schools doesn’t describe faithfully the status of profs in other fields. But either way, when I look at the growth of profs’ salaries compared to admins’ salaries, admins win. And the difference is systemic since I am looking at the growth of median salaries.
In the case of my university, the growth of the headcounts of admins is also increasing much faster than tenured profs. Just this past year, we added 70 admins and 1 tenured prof.
“I think tenured faculty, at least at R1 universities, have made themselves extremely expensive relative to the revenues they generate. ”
Ah, I didn’t know that profs are supposed to generate revenue. How about K-12 teachers? How much revenue are they supposed to generate?
Besides, until I see precise stats like mine, I don’t belive one bit that profs’ salaries increase faster than admins.
Dr. Ravitch,
That is incorrect, at least in my discipline. As is true for most of the non-tenure stream faculty at R1 institutions, I am employed full time on a multi-year contract with full benefits. I am paid a bit over $100,000 a year. I know of other NTS faculty that earn over twice as much.
Typically, in my experience, adjuncts are paid per course, with no pension or health benefits. Depending on the institution, they may be paid $5,000-7,000 to teach one course. If they teach five courses, that’s $25,000-35,000 per year, and that’s a very heavy course load. If they tea honly two or three courses, they are below the poverty line. How much are adjuncts paid per course at Kansas U?
He clearly is not an adjunct and he is business/economics school where salaries are different. Our instructors in my dept are paid $40K.
I am a faculty member in the college of arts and sciences, but you are of course correct that salaries vary greatly depending on the outside options of the individuals.
One issue here is that people are conflating non-tenure stream and part time adjuncts, as I pointed out in a post above. If you look at my link, you will find that 85% of the non-tenure stream faculty at R1 universities are full time with full benefits. If schools have the resources to hire full time, they do it and pay what has to be paid.
TE, you are making stuff up by redefining terms. 70% of faculty in American higher education are not on a tenure track and never will be. They are treated as serfs after spending years of study and amassing student debt to get a Ph.D.
You come to this blog for no purpose other than to nitpick and argue.
You do it again and again.
You never make a useful or positive contribution.
You are a perennial naysayer.
As a guest in my living room, you are politely obnoxious.
Go away and don’t come back.
“I am a faculty member in the college of arts and sciences, but you are of course correct that salaries vary greatly depending on the outside options of the individuals.”
It’s not about outside options of the individuals. In one department of our business school, the starting salary is $150K, while in other departments it could be as low as $50K. There is no realtionship between the salaries and quality of the prof.
In CA higher ed salary system, the salaries of profs in businesschools are establised higher than for others.
But arguing over this just helps the divide and conquer strategy of the admins. The real issue is the increasing temp faculty and administration. And that’s where kids’ tuition increase goes: administration
Dr. Ravitch,
You are conflating non-tenure stream faculty with adjunct. All adjuncts are non-tenure stream faculty. Not all non-tenure stream faculty are adjuncts. There are a large and growing group of reasonably paid full time non-tenure stream faculty in the academy. We get full benefits, reasonable job security from our multiyear contracts, and the expectation on both sides that the contract will be renewed. We are not surfs.
If you call $40K reasonable pay for an instructor with a PhD, go ahead. Also, there is no academic freedom without tenure, hence it doesn’t matter if these instrutors may get benefits.
Without academic freedom, students are screwed—and that’s exactly what the Kochs want.
Mate,
I certainly agree that salary differences across a university are not correlated with the quality of the professors. I should not have used the word individual to describe outside options, rather it is the general level of outside options for a field that determine salary. Medical school physicians/administrators are the highest paid group of academics in universities because their outside option is to practice medicine and the university must pay them enough to keep them from practicing medicine. Universities must also pay sociology professors enough to keep them in the academy, but their outside option is not as lucrative as those of physicians.
It is certainly true that administration has taken over some of what used to be faculty duties. When I began teaching at my university, faculty did all of the undergraduate advising. We were not especially good at it. Now there are professional advisors, nearly 30 of them in my college alone.
At my univ, we are doing our own advising. We are not talking about useful admin positions that may be part of a department, but so called deanlet positions and VP positions with ridiculous salaries, salary increases and foggy jobdesctiptions.
I have no idea why you insist on trying to underplay unnecessary administrative growth which is the main source of tuition and student fee increases.
There are two facts: the vast majority of temp employees have low jobsecurity (and often below $30K wages), and admins grow without bound.
Counterexamples are scarce and unimportant.
Mate,
I keep telling TE to go away.
He likes to be negative and provocative.
He is the skunk at every garden party.
I don’t know why he feels compelled to defend administrative bloat.
I think he is trying to slip in the idea, that universitoies don’t tenured people since they are too expensive, and nontenured people are doing a fine job.
Yes, but it is not clear why he is defending this status quo, which ruins the lives of so many young scholars
Uh, some of my latter posts are way too garbled.
Anyhow, maybe TE is working for one of the Koch institutes. But it doesn’t have to be so direct or so sinister. Many tenured and nontenured profs do sign up for the idea that universities should operate as if they were businesses, for short term, pragmatic goals. Especially young colleagues have this disappointing view.
So… the adjuncts are getting full time? Or??
No, we have full time, non-tenured instructors, lecturers, research profs. Adjuncts have their usual life of teaching at several places, driving all day long. It’s really terrible.
Mate Wierdl: It’s true: I spend five years driving all over Virginia from Longwood College, and then the Virginia Community College system, then to a high school in central Virginia–here and there and everywhere. I LOVED teaching and cannot regret it. But . . . . CBK
In other words, the pool of adjuncts is different from the instructor pool. There may be some adjunts who get lucky, and get full time, but I don’t think it happens often.
At my public university, we have 1600 staff/adminitrators, vs 650 tenured ot tenure track profs. That’s what students pay for. The median admin salary has been increasing 2.5 times faster than the median salary of tenured profs. That’s what the students pay for. Tenured profs median salary has stayed 6% below inflation in the last 10 years, hence that’s the drop of our standard of living.
The fact that these changes happen with the median salary tells you without a doubt that the change is systemic.
Here is my talk on the subject. Download and open in Acrobat.
Click to access 2019senate_salary.pdf
I wish all public universities would compile such simple statistics, and then we can go to town together.
I have to add: I made these statements on my behalf only, and not as any (including myself) university employee.
You make an important distinction that eludes the “policy scholars” at Bluegrass Institute. They list the universities that employ them to enhance the stature of an ideological, politically motivated, website funded by anti-tax Koch’s. Bluegrass Institute fails to meet the standards of scholarly objectivity.
Linda, could you elaborate?
Hope this helps to explain-
Bluegrass’ “policy scholars” are identified with their employers’ names which happen to be public universities.
Faculty, as professionals, should understand that when they take controversial, politicized positions like those of Bluegrass (Koch funded) that their employers should be left off the listings because the scholars’ opinions are individual. The information at Bluegrass does not reflect well on scholarly standards for objective research. Under the circumstances, advocacy for questionable and offensive policy, damages the employers’ reputation by the association.
Evidently, there are professors at Western Kentucky University, the University of Louisville and the University of Kentucky who think their institutions’ reputations should be linked to Koch-funded policy positions. In so doing, their employers are subject to public rebuke.
In addition to the preceding, state university professors are public employees. Public employees are supposed to refrain from using the authority of their employment positions to further partisan political agendas.
“In addition to the preceding, state university professors are public employees. Public employees are supposed to refrain from using the authority of their employment positions to further partisan political agendas.”
This statement is difficult to make. What if this employment position is the one that would protect the university from Kochs and friends? What if the university is under attack from a Governor? Should student know about it, whose money actually is used to support some political agendas, like pushing for privatization of the university? The quote was used a few times to silence or even terminate politically undesirable faculty.
Interestingly, ALEC has a bill for free speech on college campuses, which are then used to make the case for Kochs to say and teach anything they want on campus.
Faculty should never refrain from speaking out in support of their universities’ missions.
The anti-tax Koch agenda threatens the mission of public universities. White nationalists threaten university mission.
The distinction is very important. We should not fall victim to false equivalencies from the right wing. We should always push back against their framing of issues.
A top university in the area, noted for educating quality public school teachers, had dropped its education classes. It is known as an urban public university that catered to first generation college students. They now cannot earn a needed credential into the middle class profession of teaching.