Our great public university says it is a “student-centered”
institution. Wonderful! No arguments from TPP. It also promotes the idea of shared
governance where students, faculty, and administrators cooperate and
collaborate to decide on various policies, but when it comes to the fiscal side of things, somehow this sharing comes up short. The Provost seems to want to run things
based on the corporate model.
Now actually TPP is willing to give this a try, at least if they really
mean what they say when they say a business model. But here’s an example of how it
really goes. A whole bunch of lab classroom
stools all break at about the same time; apparently 12 years is their useful
life expectancy due to a design flaw (who knew?), and they were all bought at
the same time, so where do you get the money for stools? There’s no money in the dept budget and the
need could not have been anticipated, and recently even well justified needs go unfunded. So
you ask your dean, who also has no resources, so they turn to the provost. The provost says that this instructional infrastructure
is the responsibility of the dept. Now
you would expect a student-centered institution to want students to have a seat
in a classroom, but apparently only academic departments are student-centered
enough to care. So what’s the
problem? Why can’t this be solved in a
business- like manner? BECAUSE THE
FREAKIN’ PROVOST HAS ALL THE TUITION MONEY!
Yes, in a real business model the academic unit that earns the credit
hours should get the tuition money. Then
we could decide which services the department needs and wants to pay for. Custodians? Sure. Grounds maintenance? Why not? Administrators could submit their reason for
existing, and we academics could decide if we want an assistant to the vice
provost. Provost? Let us think about that one awhile. So our university is being run on a phony
baloney business model where the person with all the fiscal resources turns
around and tells you everything is your responsibility but they withhold the
resources you earned and need to take responsibility. So whose fault is it if students find themselves standing up? Perhaps we need a peasant revolt because something around here is revolting.
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1 comment:
OK, this is quite interesting. I am of course trained to accept the problem you describe as the order of things since the university is a centralized state and not a federation. I wish I knew more about economies of different empires, so I could say something germane and astute.
In a corporation, though, are not some parts of it big income generators that do not see all of the fruits of their labor?
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