The Perverse Economics of College Construction

I’m having a little trouble typing, because the temperature in my office at the moment is around 55 F, and my hands are getting really cold. This is because of “deferred maintenance,” which means “we’re saving money by not maintaining the air-handling systems in our academic buildings (among other things).” The budget has been tight […]

Academic Poll: How Do You Like Your Interviews?

The always interesting Timothy Burke has a post on the economics of conference attendance, inspired by Brian Croxall’s essay about why he didn’t attend the MLA. The key problem for both of them is that the way the academic job market is structured inn the humanities forces job seekers to attend the MLA for “screening […]

Think of It as Kid Insurance

Janet has a typically thoughtful post about tuition benefits, following on a proposal to eliminate tuition benefits for employees of the University of Illinois. Janet does a great job of rounding up the various pros and cons of the benefit and its possible elimination. It takes no time at all for the “Tuition benefits are […]

Tenure: Threat, Menace, or Market Failure?

I’ve been a little too busy to participate, but His Holiness and Eric Weinstein on Twitter have gotten into an interesting exchange about the structure of academia, and the appropriate number of Ph.D.’s in science. As usual, I suspect I’m not fully understanding the majesty of whatever Eric is arguing in favor of, but it’s […]

Beauty’s Just Another Word I’m Never Certain How to Spell

Like every other blogger with a political opinion, I read Paul Krugman’s essay on economics last week, and tagged it for Saturday’s Links Dump. And while I appreciate Eric Weinstein calling me out as part of the “high end blogosphere,” I’m not sure I have much to say about it that is useful. But, since […]

Furloughs and Shutdowns

Janet is currently exploring the implications of the California university furloughs. If you haven’t been paying attention, California is so grossly dysfunctional that the state government has had to order all employees– including university faculty– to take 9% of their work time off as unpaid “furlough” days, in order to cut costs enough to have […]

Let’s Hear It for the Staff

The Dean Dad had a great post about staff yesterday: Politically, hiring office staff is a harder sell than hiring faculty. Faculty are conspicuous, and the tie to the classroom is obvious. Back-office support staff are inconspicuous, and show up in public discussion as ‘overhead’ or ‘administrative bloat.’ But their work is necessary, as anyone […]