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Question for today’s break: Cash strapped U’s

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File:A small cup of coffee.JPG… can afford so many administrators and pump up grades?

And the problem of burgeoning bureaucracy helps explain some worrying trends, foremost being a perceptible decline in academic standards over time (it’s evident in grade inflation; there are three times as many Oxford Firsts now as there were 30 years ago) and — a lesser problem — the way private donors to the university are losing the run of themselves.

You don’t have to dig deep to find academics enraged at how administration flourishes while faculties are cash-strapped.

That also explains why students with no sympathy for academic or intellectual freedom just want to be educrats, not indebted baristas.

That’s where the action is today in academic life.

Prediction: It’ll get worse before it gets better.

Second prediction: Things that cannot go on indefinitely don’t.

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Comments
My daughter is a Biology major at George Mason, a Virginia state school with pretensions. It has become PAINFULLY obvious to her (and me) that the FACULTY is in fact protected against just about EVERYTHING. Students complaining that the instruction stinks, is in fact unintelligible because the professor lacks any useful command of the English language, are told that THEY are at fault for being essentially "racist". The so-called "counselors" are themselves worthless, and apparently exist ONLY to tell students that the student: 1) is stupid, 2) is a racist, 3) doesn't understand the requirements (which the "counselor" cannot explain). So as near as I can tell, colleges now exist for the benefit of the employees (faculty and staff) of the college. There is no longer even a pretension that anything like "education" occurs at the college, only the collection of tuition and fees, which continue to escalate astronomically. My daughter planned to teach high school Biology (she's a VERY bright girl), but I think college may convince her to stay as far away from "educational professionals" as she can.mahuna
June 8, 2015
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