It wasn’t until I started TAing that I started to see the trends. Multimillion dollar athletics while some of the rooms I teach in are holdovers from the 50s. Our History dept bldg was over a 100 years old, torn down and we were moved to an office bldg off campus.
And I have to add. If it fails. We all have failed. We are more connected on education than people realize. Education is a right and should be treated as such.
Man. I want to say how refreshing this app is. I said something in positivity saying we are all connected and people just “like” it and don’t say awful things to me? What is this place!? Not Twitter. My goodness. I could get used to this.
I'm sure there are people that will stop reading when they see the writer's insistence on teaching remotely, which is of course totally not the point. Thanks for posting.
My wife has a PhD in theoretical physics. She is *scary* good at math. She sometimes manages to get adjunct teaching work, and that's the lifetime limit to her ROI.
The pandemic was good - she had employment teaching remotely. The university figured since she was "only" teaching remotely,
they could load her down with four times as many students. At the same pay, of course. (And no benefits, of course.)
IU is probably going to lose its R1 status because they've stopped supporting research. Their endowment is about $2bil. They're nominally a state school, but really,
they're a hedge fund with a basketball team.
They *used* to be among the world's best research institutions. IU Bloomington is where fruit fly research was pioneered, the location of the Kinsey Institute, the academic home of Douglas Hofstadter.
That's history.
They have the world's largest collection of Tibetan literature. Fortunately they haven't closed the library yet, but it's just a matter of time. Swain Hall library was eliminated during the renovation of the Physics department because books are obsolete now.
As someone who was in a PhD program a little over a decade ago, I was kind of seeing inklings of this. It has definitely gotten so much worse.
Now I teach high school. The abandonment of public education has trickled up.
Shy of guillotines, what is the solution?
I remember reading/writing articles 20+ years ago about how reduced state funding directly led to larger student tuition. It just keeps escalating -- let everyone else shoulder the weight.
This shouldn’t be as much if a shock as the headline implies. Lots of us have quit tenured prof jobs because there are more important priorities than the status and supposed job security of a tenured faculty position.
I have a kid in college and he was going to go straight through for his masters and then his college suspended the program in his major because they can't get the teachers. (It's Electrical and Computer Engineering....not exactly obscure.)
The decline in universities here in Australia is on a similar track. Salaries are okay, but many universities are running structural deficits. I spend my time telling students *not* to get a job as an academic.
54k is criminal
I agree politicians don't want an educated populace. I've been saying that for years. They all treat education as something they begrudgingly support but in action constantly undercut
As a retired HS teacher, I can verify that every word is true! Sadly the MAGAs standing behind TFG applauding the destruction of public education (which I believe started in earnest w/Reagan) will be the ones who will be most affected by it and most pissed off about it.
Useful idiots
Well that was terrifying. It tracks with what I see from my professor/lecturer friends, though. I recently heard the salary of a friend at a fancy private university and my jaw dropped--it was less than my starting salary in software almost 20 years ago.
After getting my PhD 25 years ago, I went into the commercial world instead of academia because of these trends (mostly regarding grant writing). I can’t imagine how much I’d be struggling financially if I had decided to go into academia. It’s sad.
“Everyone thinks we have summers off. No, that's not how it works. We don't get paid during the summer.”
The infuriating thing is when my colleagues hear me say we don’t get paid for summer, they always respond that we get pay checks in summer. As if spreading out a 9 mo salary is the same thing.
I’m in a STEM department at a flagship university, and the C-suite is cutting our budget, too. The money goes to debt service on previous bad deals, adventures in real estate, a losing football team, union-busting, legal settlements, and executive compensation
I agree with everything but would add the importance of endlessly growing endowments.
We don’t serve students in academia, we serve a pile of money that must always grow and grow. Even in a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic it can not be touched.
The pile is the true heart of the university. Do not threaten the pile. Do not even look at the pile. Do not question what is done to make the pile bigger. And even gather yearly to celebrate it’s growth! The only true marker of a university’s success.
All hail the pile of money.
I earned my PhD overseas before moving back to the States. It took about three years adjuncting to realize I had no interest whatsoever in remaining an academic.
My son is going to college to get a soul-less finance degree to become an oligarch, to him & much of society this is just a step to the big money
I'm hoping my daughter will attend university because she loves learning
