Archive for the ‘ Tenure ’ Category

“An Inside Look At College Costs”

This is a ponderable piece on the current financial situation colleges and universities have found themselves in. Who benefits from the money coming into a school? Hint: It’s probably not the faculty or the students. Here’s an excerpt: An interesting point to consider comes from the U.S. Department of Education, which surveyed nearly 3,000 colleges [ READ MORE ]

Dual Academic Careers Re-Post

Do smarty-pants professor types feel they need a bigger challenge? Was defending their dissertation not enough? All of those years of undergraduate and graduate work, living somewhere near the poverty line, working and striving for those extra letters after their names? Why do obviously intelligent humans do this to themselves? Because they want to spend [ READ MORE ]

“End The University As We Know It”

I so wanted to have something intelligent to say about this Op-Ed piece in the New York Times that points out with blunt eloquence just how over the highest levels of higher education are, but all I could manage were utterances like, “Damn…that’s fu**ed up.” One is hard-pressed to add any worthwhile bits to a [ READ MORE ]

Academe in a Bad Economy

Scoring some funding or getting a smidgen of a paycheck in academe is hard enough in a stable economy, but it becomes a turnip-squeezing situation when the economy hits the skids. Female Science Professor has two posts up that explain some of the problems academics are facing, and which crises warrant the most panic. Budget [ READ MORE ]

Plagiarizing Never Ends Well

I want to be all cranky and yammer on about how it serves a plagiarizing professor right to lose his job, etc., but I’m mostly just sad. James Twitchell was a tenured professor at the University of Florida until last month, when he opted for early retirement in lieu of a five-year, unpaid suspension. He [ READ MORE ]

Bad News First

The bad news is this story about tenured faculty positions being slowly made extinct. Not a shocking bit of info as it’s been going on for quite some time, but distressing nonetheless. Colleges and universities have been steadily decreasing their tenured-professor numbers for the past few decades, all in the name of budget cuts, saving [ READ MORE ]