Quote from: sprout on May 10, 2024, 12:21:56 PMQuote from: apl68 on May 03, 2024, 08:06:55 AMThe Surgeon of Crowthorne, by Simon Winchester. As much as anything, this is a love letter to the Oxford English Dictionary. The print version of the OED, which I recall using some in grad school, is an awe-inspiring work. Multiple, vast, well-produced volumes, filled with hundreds of thousands of words, each with a painstaking etymology and numerous quotes tracing its assorted definitions and shades of meaning down through the centuries. Though the first edition was not completed until the 1920s, it was in origin a fantastically ambitious Victorian project.
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Sounds like this is a retitling of The Professor and the Madman which I enjoyed a while back!
Quote from: jimbogumbo on May 10, 2024, 02:28:11 PMQuote from: methodsman on May 07, 2024, 02:04:13 PM. And, no, contrary to popular belief, the growth in administrators is not the cause of most
institutions' demise.
mm
Maybe, but it sure doesn't help. Here is a recent Atlantic piece: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/news/no-one-knows-what-universities-are-for/ar-BB1m2mbD
QuoteThe world has more pressing issues than overstaffing at America's colleges. But it's nonetheless a real problem that could be a factor in rising college costs.
QuoteAfter all, higher education is a labor-intensive industry in which worker compensation is driving inflation, and for much of the 21st century, compensation costs grew fastest among noninstructional professional positions. Some of these job cuts could result in lower graduation rates or reduced quality of life on campus. Many others might go unnoticed by students and faculty. In the 2018 book Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, David Graeber drew on his experience as a college professor to excoriate college admin jobs that were "so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case."
Another reason to care about the growth of university bureaucracy is that it siphons power away from instructors and researchers at institutions that are—theoretically—dedicated to instruction and research. In the past few decades, many schools have hired more part-time faculty, including adjunct professors, to keep up with teaching demands, while their full-time-staff hires have disproportionately been for administration positions. As universities shift their resources toward admin, they don't just create resentment among faculty; they may constrict the faculty's academic freedom.
Quote"Take something like diversity, equity, and inclusion," Ginsberg said. "Many colleges who adopt DEI principles have left-liberal faculty who, of course, are in favor of the principles of DEI, in theory," he said. But the logic of a bureaucracy is to take any mission and grow its power indefinitely, whether or not such growth serves the underlying institution. "Before long, many schools create provosts for diversity, and for equity, and for inclusion. These provosts hold lots of meetings. They create a set of principles. They tell faculty to update their syllabi to be consistent with new principles devised in those meetings. And so, before long, you've built an administrative body that is directly intruding on the core function of teaching."
Quote from: jimbogumbo on May 10, 2024, 02:29:52 PMIn support of an opinion upthread from Wahoo: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/05/protest-effectiveness-research/678292/
Quote from: secundem_artem on May 10, 2024, 03:07:07 PMSomebody somewhere is making a mint selling keffiyehs to white college kids who didn't even know what those things were 6 weeks ago.