Showing posts with label economy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label economy. Show all posts
Thursday, September 4, 2014
From the 2010 archives: Glass ceiling & tiered employment: not just for #adjuncts
…blogged five years ago on this day in 2010. Change where are thou? I just added 'irony' to the tags. Ruccio still rules...
Tuesday, July 10, 2012
“It’s stupid economists, people”
It’s mainstream economists, not economists in general. And they’re not really stupid, just dogmatic in their insistence on a particular theory of economics. But Ross Gittins [ht: tm] does put his figure on a real problem.Why mess around with a good thing by adding more of my own superfluous copy? Read the rest of “It’s stupid economists, people” at occasional links & commentary, David F. Ruccio
Friday, September 2, 2011
Reading Room: In defense of public education
Public education, higher, middle and lower, is under siege. I'm old enough to remember reading "Why Johnny Can't Read" (Time, 1955), but the current fever pitch reaches new levels: rants, critiques, conflict and conflicting solutions multiply. Johnny still can't read, yet there is still no agreement on the why or the how. If that was a problem in middle school, imagine Johnny in college now because, ready or not, everyone is supposed to go.New this round are two game changers. One is disruptive innovation in the form of advances in communication technology, learning analytics and sophisticated algorithms for learning software touted as capable of supplanting teachers or at least reducing the number needed. The other is the economy shrinking education funding. See the connection?
Enter conflicting solutions and the players bearing them ~ the tech team vs the traditionalists or New School vs Old School.
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
Most With Least
Savage Chickens sums up the grim assessments of the academic job market as well as or better than any of the many articles, essays, blog posts, tweet collections, what have you...
More Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Where Should We Go After the Fee Hikes?
Where Should We Go After the Fee Hikes?: "legitimacy and the great public absence" ~ cross-posted from Chris Newfield’s Remaking the University, 11/21/09, guest post by Kris Peterson, UC Irvine:
I just finished watching a YouTube video of Regents Bonnie Reiss and Eddie Island make a quick get-a-way to their vehicle at UCLA - just after they voted to increase student fees by an unprecedented 32%. They were surrounded and followed by students chanting, "Shame on you!" Reiss represents the banking and finance industry; and Island, a retiree of McDonnell-Douglas, represents the defense industry. So, given that these two industries, with their ballooned subsidies and profits, have done nothing more than take this country down over the last several years, I'm thinking a lot about legitimacy. Not legitimacy related to governance. Rather, legitimacy in terms of representation and intent.
Let me go back in time. Between 1952 and 2007, UC had a vibrant relationship with its patron, the weapons industry. Over the years, some found this relationship egregious, as the public was concerned about nuclear proliferation and Cold War military conflicts throughout the world. Culminating in the 1970s, student protests against UC-managed Labs indexed these global events. Yet despite all this, the one thing that the weapons industry, and indeed the US military, had in common with a stellar, highly endowed, multi-campus, public university was the priority of research. Whether it was about NSEP language grants, private sector-federal government partnerships, or DOD and NSF funding that blurred the lines between foreign policy and military interests, a strong interdisciplinary research institution, writ large, was good for this industry.
But now we have a new relationship that constitutes a mix of patronage and competition. It's been built with the finance industry, commercial real estate – Big Business generally – all of which the Regents represent.
I just finished watching a YouTube video of Regents Bonnie Reiss and Eddie Island make a quick get-a-way to their vehicle at UCLA - just after they voted to increase student fees by an unprecedented 32%. They were surrounded and followed by students chanting, "Shame on you!" Reiss represents the banking and finance industry; and Island, a retiree of McDonnell-Douglas, represents the defense industry. So, given that these two industries, with their ballooned subsidies and profits, have done nothing more than take this country down over the last several years, I'm thinking a lot about legitimacy. Not legitimacy related to governance. Rather, legitimacy in terms of representation and intent.
Let me go back in time. Between 1952 and 2007, UC had a vibrant relationship with its patron, the weapons industry. Over the years, some found this relationship egregious, as the public was concerned about nuclear proliferation and Cold War military conflicts throughout the world. Culminating in the 1970s, student protests against UC-managed Labs indexed these global events. Yet despite all this, the one thing that the weapons industry, and indeed the US military, had in common with a stellar, highly endowed, multi-campus, public university was the priority of research. Whether it was about NSEP language grants, private sector-federal government partnerships, or DOD and NSF funding that blurred the lines between foreign policy and military interests, a strong interdisciplinary research institution, writ large, was good for this industry.
But now we have a new relationship that constitutes a mix of patronage and competition. It's been built with the finance industry, commercial real estate – Big Business generally – all of which the Regents represent.
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